tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-77045830617234708042017-08-14T07:34:10.680-04:00The Film Doctornotes on cinemaThe Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.comBlogger861125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-20664752300757410732017-08-03T15:32:00.001-04:002017-08-05T09:45:13.427-04:00captive attention links<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d-i5cYUAT4w/WYXL2z6M-QI/AAAAAAAAJJQ/cyvdVwrmiBYodX8Gf1MukTpLTePGh2TOwCLcBGAs/s1600/Call-Me-Be-Your-Name-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="515" data-original-width="800" height="206" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-d-i5cYUAT4w/WYXL2z6M-QI/AAAAAAAAJJQ/cyvdVwrmiBYodX8Gf1MukTpLTePGh2TOwCLcBGAs/s320/Call-Me-Be-Your-Name-1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>---<i><a href="https://vimeo.com/227733336">Not a Grande Dame</a> </i>by Catherine Grant<br /><br /><i>---<a href="https://vimeo.com/blog/post/incident-by-a-bank?utm_source=social&amp;utm_campaign=9920&amp;autoplay=1&amp;linkId=40502010">Incident by a Bank</a></i><br /><br />---trailers for <i><a href="http://screenrant.com/thor-ragnarok-trailer-2-comic-con/">Thor: Ragnarok</a>, <a href="http://www.indiewire.com/2017/07/proud-mary-trailer-taraji-p-henson-action-hero-1201856715/">Proud Mary</a>,</i>&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.indiewire.com/2017/08/call-me-by-your-name-trailer-luca-guadagnino-armie-hammer-best-films-2017-oscars-1201859389/">Call Me By Your Name</a>, <a href="http://theplaylist.net/rooney-mara-ben-mendelsohn-face-past-new-trailer-una-20170720/?utm_source=dlvr.it&amp;utm_medium=twitter">Una</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://theplaylist.net/ready-player-one-trailer-steven-spielberg-20170722/">Ready Player One</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://theplaylist.net/justice-league-trailer-ben-affleck-20170722/">Justice League</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8Lnut3Oi_Q&amp;feature=youtu.be">9 Doigts</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.firstshowing.net/2017/short-teaser-for-darren-aronofskys-mother-with-jennifer-lawrence/">Mother!</a>, </i>and<i>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYga2m0V2O0&amp;feature=youtu.be">Suburbicon</a></i><br /><i><br /></i>---"What is the defining characteristic of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jul/27/violent-femmes-atomic-blonde-and-hollywoods-new-wave-of-killer-women?CMP=twt_a-film_b-gdnfilm">femme fatale</a>, that film noir archetype of the scheming woman who preys on men? Even more than greed or coldheartedness, it might be deceit: a virtuosic ability to manipulate men with lies and playacting. The femme fatale is spawned by male anxiety—not prompted by women’s wartime emancipation, as many have argued, but arising from the age-old fear of being fooled by women, and the misogynistic belief that they are inherently duplicitous and inscrutable. This shapes the way actresses play femme fatales: they are often giving a performance of a performance, enacting a charade of feminine sweetness and frailty that satisfies the expectations and desires of their marks. In Eddie Muller’s Dark City Dames, Jane Greer recalls that when she played the enchanting thief, liar, and killer Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past (1947), director Jacques Tourneur wasted no time on the character’s psychology, simply instructing her: 'First half—good girl. Second half—bad.' He told her to play it 'impassive,' conveying the depths of her evil through a shocking depthlessness. A woman like Kathie or Kitty almost doesn’t seem to have a real self beneath the layers of lies: she is, as a disgusted Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) tells Kathie, 'like a leaf the wind blows from one gutter to another.'" --Imogen Sara <a href="https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4779-dark-passages-fatal-women-and-the-fate-of-women">Smith</a><br /><br />---Anatomy of a scene: <i><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/video/movies/100000005288138/anatomy-of-a-scene-valerian.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&amp;smid=nytcore-iphone-share">Valerian</a>&nbsp;</i><br /><br />---five action <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/atomic-blonde-director-how-i-made-5-kick-ass-action-sequences-w494791">sequences</a> from <i>Atomic Blonde</i><br /><i><br /></i>---"I still feel that we’re still in the early years of what digital will ultimately become." --Henry <a href="http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/07/henry-blodget-were-deeply-underestimating-how-big-digital-media-can-be-in-the-next-decade/">Blodget</a><br /><br />---<i><a href="http://www.openculture.com/2016/09/an-animated-aldous-huxley-identifies-the-dystopian-threats-to-our-freedom-1958.html">Aldous Huxley on Technodictators</a></i><br /><br />---"If there’s a defining mood to Brooks’s work as writer/director/star, it’s one of profound restlessness and dissatisfaction, often followed closely by the shame of leading a life of privilege and comfort and its never being enough. As David, Brooks wants for nothing but perspective, and the price for that perspective is the liquidated value of his material possessions and a sizable share of his dignity and self-worth. In the film’s moral reckoning, it’s a fair sum." --Scott <a href="https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4760-lost-in-america-the-100-000-box">Tobias</a><br /><br />---"'Cool' was our mantra on this film, and it became very empowering" --Cindy <a href="https://fashionista.com/2017/07/charlize-theron-atomic-blonde-movie-costumes">Evans</a><br /><br />---<i><a href="https://vimeo.com/220848490?linkId=38627585&amp;utm_campaign=TheLegacyofParanoidThrillers&amp;utm_content=Documentary&amp;utm_medium=twitter&amp;utm_source=ENT_TWITTER&amp;vcid=30533">The Legacy of Paranoid Thrillers</a></i><br /><br />---"The premise of hijacking is that it undermines your control. This system is better at hijacking your instincts than you are at controlling them. You’d have to exert an enormous amount of energy to control whether these things are manipulating you all the time. And so we have to ask: How do we reform this attention economy and the mass hijacking of our mind?" --Tristan <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/our-minds-have-been-hijacked-by-our-phones-tristan-harris-wants-to-rescue-them/?mbid=social_twitter_onsiteshare">Harris</a><br /><br />---"Charlize <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/25/movies/charlize-therons-sick-work-ethic-atomic-blonde.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&amp;smid=nytcore-iphone-share&amp;_r=0">Theron</a> Is Not Here to Make Friends" by Anne Helen <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/charlize-theron-is-not-here-to-make-friends?utm_term=.oxYz0ABoq#.yiDNwX54O">Petersen</a><br /><br /><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1ouYLHErFrc/WYN5x-LXGyI/AAAAAAAAJJA/sVX8fpoGSGEaJBmsivi9kWgcFBfyuUqQgCLcBGAs/s1600/1thor.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="640" height="160" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-1ouYLHErFrc/WYN5x-LXGyI/AAAAAAAAJJA/sVX8fpoGSGEaJBmsivi9kWgcFBfyuUqQgCLcBGAs/s320/1thor.jpg" width="320" /></a>---Romero's filmmaking <a href="https://filmschoolrejects.com/9-filmmaking-tips-george-romero/">tips</a><br /><br />---<i><a href="http://www.firstshowing.net/2017/watch-terrifying-new-oats-studios-film-zygote-with-dakota-fanning/">Zygote</a></i><br /><br />---"They are all attempting to capture your most scarce resource — your attention — and take it hostage for money. Your captive attention is worth billions to them in advertising and subscription revenue." --Tobias <a href="https://medium.com/the-mission/the-enemy-in-our-feeds-e86511488de">Rose-Stockwell</a><br /><br />---<i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EXABQkFvYc">Schorem</a></i><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/RpMhcpDXl9g" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/08/captive-attention-links.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-6154594025175494472017-06-21T15:14:00.001-04:002017-06-21T15:14:56.856-04:00Rakka by Neill Blomkamp<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe width="320" height="266" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/VjQ2t_yNHQs/0.jpg" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VjQ2t_yNHQs?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div><br /><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/1-y75vNWTxQ" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/06/rakka-by-neill-blomkamp.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-1051991943360085202017-06-08T10:30:00.000-04:002017-06-08T10:36:22.020-04:00bruised links<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-o_EXF496WgQ/WTlcZN2mzrI/AAAAAAAAJHs/xFfahSJ5Y7gzNJIKVuLosM2ghOWYYa_3gCLcB/s1600/1charlize.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="512" data-original-width="768" height="213" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-o_EXF496WgQ/WTlcZN2mzrI/AAAAAAAAJHs/xFfahSJ5Y7gzNJIKVuLosM2ghOWYYa_3gCLcB/s320/1charlize.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>---"<a href="https://dcairns.wordpress.com/2017/06/03/that-gumnaam-you-like/">Jaan Pehecchaan Ho</a>" from <i>Gumnaam</i>&nbsp;and <i>Ghost World </i>via <a href="https://twitter.com/dcairns">@dcairns</a><br /><br />---"A Brief History of the GIF" by Lorraine <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/brief-history-gif-early-internet-innovation-ubiquitous-relic-180963543/">Boissoneault</a><br /><br />---trailers for <i><a href="http://www.firstshowing.net/2017/second-trailer-for-dark-comedy-beatriz-at-dinner-with-salma-hayek/">Beatriz at Dinner</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YirEgK7yJCg">Baby Driver</a>, <a href="http://www.indiewire.com/2017/05/good-time-trailer-robert-pattinson-safdie-brothers-cannes-1201817438/">Good Time</a>, <a href="https://thefilmstage.com/trailer/trailer-for-becoming-cary-grant-explores-the-life-of-an-hollywood-icon/">Becoming Cary Grant</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://www.firstshowing.net/2017/first-trailer-for-steven-soderberghs-new-heist-comedy-logan-lucky/">Logan Lucky</a>, </i>and <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjCebKn4iic">Okja</a></i><br /><i><br /></i><i>---"</i>So when it came time for her own directorial debut, Ms. Lister-Jones knew she wanted to work with a woman behind the camera. Only women behind the camera, actually: For her indie comedy <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZoNcq49zUY"><i>Band Aid</i></a>, released Friday, June 2, Ms. Lister-Jones hired an all-female crew, from the grips to the drivers to the production assistants.<br /><br />'I wanted to see what it would feel like,” she said, “if a community of women exclusively created a piece of art together.'" --Melena <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/movies/zoe-lister-jones-all-female-film-crew.html?smid=tw-share&amp;_r=0">Ryzik</a><br /><br />---"<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qJp6xlKEug">Saturnz Barz</a>" by the Gorillaz<br /><br />---the pleasures of wealth and fame and <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/johnny-depp-a-star-crisis-insane-story-his-missing-millions-1001513">Johnny Depp</a><br /><br />---<i><a href="http://blogs.iu.edu/aplaceforfilm/2017/05/23/maya-derens-film-philosophy/">Maya Deren's Film Philosophy</a></i><br /><br />---"my interest was telling this story [<i>Ghost World</i>] in a slightly exaggerated, nightmarish, almost film-noir version of the world. A social and critical satire depicting America’s fabric woven from falsehoods and lies, hypocrisies and scams. It just seems to be what happens in a capitalist society. There’s politicians and TV evangelists and corporations, and none of them have the best interest of the average citizen." --Terry <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/05/terry-zwigoff-ghost-world-bad-santa-interview">Zwigoff</a><br /><span style="color: #231f20; font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , &quot;times&quot; , serif; font-size: 18px;"><br /></span>---the best aggregators of film links? <a href="https://twitter.com/CriterionDaily">@CriterionDaily</a>,&nbsp;<i><a href="http://moviecitynews.com/">Movie City News</a></i>, and <a href="https://twitter.com/nathanielr">@nathanielr</a>'s link <a href="https://twitter.com/nathanielr">lists</a><br /><br />---"The handsomest Frenchman on earth, swaddled in an outsize yet epaulet-perfect trenchcoat, hiding deep blue pools of blankness under the brim of a fedora, stares into Parisian drizzle through a rain-blurred windshield, inserting keys from a huge ring until he finds the one that fits. A steel-haired, middle-aged, world-weary gambler comes up with the grandest con of his day while cruising the nightspots and fleshpots of backstreet Montmartre, but his moment of deepest melancholy comes from a single gaze upon the bare back of a young girl he’s sheltered as she sleeps with his young protégé. A bald, stocky Jewish Frenchman, wearing a Stetson and sunglasses at night, barrels his Cadillac convertible down the Champs-Élysées in search of diversion. Alain Delon in <i>Le Samouraï</i>, Roger Duchesne in <i>Bob the Gambler</i>, the great filmmaker of action and attitude Jean-Pierre Melville in life." --Ray <a href="https://newcityfilm.com/2017/05/29/electric-cool/">Pride</a><br /><br />---"one of the fascinating things about the cinematic image is precisely that it’s difficult to pin it down." --Laura <a href="http://www.fourbythreemagazine.com/issue/death/laura-mulvey-interview">Mulvey</a><br /><br />---"On the music of <i>Ghost World</i>" by Terry <a href="https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4614-on-the-music-of-ghost-world">Zwigoff</a><br /><br />---“I remember it was Day 2, my body was hurting, and my face is all bruised up, and my eye was swollen shut,” Ms. Theron said. “I remember thinking to myself, really?” --from "Women Who Have the Chops (and the Punches and the Kicks)" by Julie <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/05/movies/women-action-roles-charlize-theron-atomic-blonde-michelle-rodriguez-milla-jovovich.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&amp;smid=nytcore-iphone-share">Bloom</a><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , &quot;times new roman&quot; , &quot;times&quot; , serif; font-size: 17px;"><br /></span>---<i><a href="http://nofilmschool.com/2017/05/orson-welles-greatest-director-of-all-time">Orson Welles: Hollywood Magician</a></i><br /><br />---an excerpt from <i>Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You </i>by Charles <a href="http://www.indiewire.com/2017/06/american-movies-70s-charles-taylor-1201838753/">Taylor</a><br /><br />---"Bill Condon’s live-action remake of <i>Beauty and the Beast</i> presents an odd and dilated experience of this particular kind of uncanny nostalgia, without any acknowledgment of its own weirdness. It is at once discomfitingly familiar and unfamiliar. By consistently hitting certain marks hard (precise musical cues, familiar costumes, lines of dialogue, and a multitude of shot-for-shot reenactments that feel like torpid tableaux vivants), it relies upon the viewer’s assumed willingness to completely integrate the new fetish object and the lost original. In so doing, it suggests that the pleasures of mere recognition offered by this uncharismatic filmic doppelgänger should be enough to regain or even surpass the enchantment of its original for the return viewer. This is a remake that refuses to acknowledge the inevitable uncanniness of its status as such. In its dogged familiarity, however, the specter of the original only becomes more and more insistent. In the lackluster and slightly down-tempo musical numbers, it becomes harder and harder to be present in the movie theater while another (better) version is being simulcast on the screen of memory." --Sara <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/just-like-the-first-time-revisiting-beauty-and-the-beast-and-trainspotting/">Chihaya</a><br /><br />---10 <a href="http://nofilmschool.com/2017/05/watch-10-tips-will-help-you-be-more-productive-filmmaker">tips</a> for filmmakers<br /><br />---"Netflix Isn't Killing Movies, Hollywood Studies and Theaters Are" by Jordan <a href="https://www.inverse.com/article/31865-cannes-netflix-booing-okja-studios-hurting-movies">Zakarin</a><br /><br />---"<a href="https://www.fandor.com/posts/sofia-coppola-s-favorite-films?position=4&amp;section=most+recent">Sofia Coppola</a> on Bill Murray, Nicole Kidman, and the Movie that Made Her the Second Woman to Win Best Director at Cannes" by Lynn <a href="https://www.wmagazine.com/story/sofia-coppola-the-beguiled-cannes-film-festival-best-director">Hirschberg</a><br /><br />---"To me, it’s telling the same story but from the women characters’ point of view. I would never want to remake someone else’s movie, but I love the premise of it. When I saw the movie I thought it was so… I don’t know… weird. It stayed in my mind. It’s a very macho guy’s point of view in this women’s world, so it started making me think about what it must have been like for the women during wartime. They were raised to relate to men, that was their whole role in the Southern world of that era, and now there’s no men. It was wartime but these women were left behind." --Sofia <a href="http://lwlies.com/interviews/sofia-coppola-the-beguiled/">Coppola</a><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jWPjFlu85Eo/WTldLlQ6IrI/AAAAAAAAJH0/eV7z08QtKVMxX6bx3OsBSNKD17RKVW2PwCLcB/s1600/1Baby-Driver-5_1200_758_81_s.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="758" data-original-width="1200" height="202" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jWPjFlu85Eo/WTldLlQ6IrI/AAAAAAAAJH0/eV7z08QtKVMxX6bx3OsBSNKD17RKVW2PwCLcB/s320/1Baby-Driver-5_1200_758_81_s.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>---"It’s also important to remember that most of these images are actually sequences of images: Peter O’Toole blowing out the match followed by the sun rising over the desert, the baby carriage rolling down the steps amid the chaos and brutality of the attack by the Cossacks. And beyond that, each separate cinematic image is comprised of a succession of still frames that creates the impression of motion. They are recordings of instants in time. But the moment you put them together, something else happens. Every time I get back into the editing room, I feel the wonder of it. One image is joined with another image, and a third phantom event happens in the mind’s eye – perhaps an image, perhaps a thought, perhaps a sensation. Something occurs, something absolutely unique to this particular combination or collision of moving images. And if you take a frame away from one or add a couple of frames to the other, the image in the mind’s eye changes. It’s a wonder to me, and I’m far from alone. Sergei Eisenstein talked about it on a theoretical level, and the Czech filmmaker František Vlácil discusses it in an interview included on the Criterion edition of his great medieval epic <i>Marketa Lazarová</i> (1967). The film critic Manny Farber understood it as elemental to art in general – that’s why he named his collection of writings <i>Negative Space</i>. This 'principle', if that’s what you could call it, is just as applicable to the juxtaposition of words in poetry or forms and colours in painting. It is, I think, fundamental to the art of cinema. This is where the act of creation meets the act of viewing and engaging, where the common life of the filmmaker and the viewer exists, in those intervals of time between the filmed images that last a fraction of a fraction of a second but that can be vast and endless. This is where a good film comes alive as something more than a succession of beautifully composed renderings of a script. This is film-making. Does this 'phantom image' exist for casual viewers without an awareness of how films are put together? I believe it does. I don’t know how to read music and neither do most people I know, but we all 'feel' the progression from one chord to another in music that affects us, and by implication some kind of awareness that a different progression would be a different experience." --Martin <a href="http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/film-making-martin-scorsese/">Scorsese</a><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/rQ5ioXZCyvk" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/06/bruised-links.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-68451336906449077062017-06-04T19:27:00.000-04:002017-06-05T15:03:19.183-04:00Comfortable in no man's land: the pleasurable questions of Wonder Woman<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7NUPN-zTmVk/WTSGeps2IJI/AAAAAAAAJHU/xi_7-lOD9q4ShsH9694b7z-jI5Zuhm5iACLcB/s1600/jzz3k2pzmuah6eowtzq1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="471" data-original-width="620" height="242" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-7NUPN-zTmVk/WTSGeps2IJI/AAAAAAAAJHU/xi_7-lOD9q4ShsH9694b7z-jI5Zuhm5iACLcB/s320/jzz3k2pzmuah6eowtzq1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>'Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world.’ --William Moulton <a href="http://screenprism.com/insights/article/what-is-wonder-womans-backstory-and-origin">Marston</a>&nbsp;(the original creator of Wonder Woman)<br /><div><br /></div><div>I enjoyed director Patty Jenkins' <i>Wonder Woman</i>&nbsp;in part because the movie begs several questions that I've been brooding on, such as why did the filmmakers choose <a href="http://warisboring.com/world-war-i-is-the-perfect-setting-for-wonder-woman/">the first World War</a> for its story and not some more recent period?&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>Why is the battle scene where Wonder Woman climbs up from a trench and takes on a classic stalemated no man's land the strongest one in the movie? How does <i>Wonder Woman </i>resist superhero blockbuster fatigue? I don't usually care much for heightened characters with unrealistic CGI-driven powers. How is it that Gal Gadot's version of a superhero almost makes her superpowers beside the point? What is the relationship between Wonder Woman's mythological origin/worldview (with its emphasis on Ares, Zeus, Hippolyta, etc.,) and the more historical one of Steve Trevor (Chris Pine)? Even as naked and bathing Steve Trevor describes himself as being an "above average" specimen of mankind, is he even needed in this movie? When Wonder Woman decides to go find and fight Ares as a way to stop war, is she being naive or somehow smarter than Steve? &nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>When we see Robin Wright playing Antiope as Diana Prince's fighting coach on Paradise Island, are we supposed to see her work here as some fundamental opposition to her usual role as the conniving Claire Underwood in the much more cynical <i>House of Cards</i>? How much is the success of <i>Wonder Woman </i>due to its lack of cynicism? When Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) faints underwater after crash landing his plane near Paradise Island, is he meant to look weak and helpless before waking to find an Amazon staring at him on the beach and saying "A man!" somewhat like Miranda does in Shakespeare's <i>The Tempest</i>&nbsp;when she beholds her first man: &nbsp;"How beauteous mankind is, Oh brave new world," etc.? When Wonder Woman rather whimsically decides to climb the ladder and start running toward a machine gun nest across no man's land, are we supposed to think of hundreds of thousands of men being nihilistically slaughtered in movies such as <i>Gallipoli </i>(1981) and <i>Paths of Glory </i>(1957)? Does it help somehow that the movie doesn't have Nazis, so that one can also associate this movie with Jean Renoir's more sympathetic portrait of the Germans in&nbsp;<i>Grand Illusion</i>&nbsp;(1937)?</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1jYhYcyu2A4/WTSIUlNUswI/AAAAAAAAJHY/5GQ--nEWc-IZEM9_9avy1rWg3PXwLvukwCLcB/s1600/DBeopTCWAAAcbRQ.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="679" data-original-width="737" height="294" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1jYhYcyu2A4/WTSIUlNUswI/AAAAAAAAJHY/5GQ--nEWc-IZEM9_9avy1rWg3PXwLvukwCLcB/s320/DBeopTCWAAAcbRQ.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div>Wonder Woman is an ideological opposition to male dominance in a svelte package, an oddly compassionate goddess-woman who can scarcely see a wounded war veteran without wanting to do something about it. I'm not sure how it works. Perhaps <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/last-amazon?">Jill Lepore</a>'s book can help explain things. &nbsp;At any rate, Diana Prince proves refreshing as an antidote to stupid masculine oppression everywhere.<br /><br />Related links:<br /><br />---"Top Ten Things About Wonder Woman" by Anthony <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/top-ten-things-about-wonder-woman?intcid=mod-latest">Lane</a><br /><br />---"Jenkins sets her “Wonder Woman” in the First World War instead of the Second, and, in a way, this makes a certain chronological sense, since the Marston family’s models were the formidable women who fought for suffrage, equal rights, and birth control in the nineteen-teens and twenties." --Jill <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/wonder-womans-unwinnable-war">Lepore</a></div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/idmJwgCoTyU" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/06/comfortable-in-no-mans-land-pleasurable.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-89524181466178539052017-06-01T15:23:00.000-04:002017-06-03T06:05:51.540-04:00The mystery of creation and terminal sequelitis: a discussion about Alien: Covenant<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-n5_rIbmCb5k/WTBfNUXi52I/AAAAAAAAJHE/5mGdcyxliXc37QY4Gkvfh9akrud-VekbgCLcB/s1600/alienwater.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="630" data-original-width="1200" height="168" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-n5_rIbmCb5k/WTBfNUXi52I/AAAAAAAAJHE/5mGdcyxliXc37QY4Gkvfh9akrud-VekbgCLcB/s320/alienwater.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><i>One afternoon recently, deep in the heart of the Film Doctor compound, Wickham F. and I discussed&nbsp;</i>Alien Covenant<i>:</i><br /><div><br /></div><b>FD</b>: We both came out of <i>Alien: Covenant</i> reasonably entertained, but I had a lots of mixed feelings about the movie. I've taught the original <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qymtvpkdEgI">Alien</a></i> (1979) in my science fiction class, and <i>Alien: Covenant</i> struck me as being way <i>way</i> too similar to that film. It had the same music, the same scenes in terms of the way the aliens took over people, and a lot of the same plot developments. It seemed more like a remix than a sequel in which Ridley Scott was intent upon returning the viewer to favorite moments in the past in some sort of greatest hits. <i>Alien: Covenant</i> came across as such a bizarre cannibalizing of the original movie, which does hold up amazingly well. Part of the charm of <i>Alien</i> is that the technology is so crude . . .<br /><br /><b>W</b>: It's a man in an alien suit.<br /><br /><b>FD</b>: So much of the movie could be terrible, but because of the biology, the imagery, and the design hold up so well.<br /><br /><b>W</b>: Yes, by H.R. Giger.<br /><br /><b>FD</b>: I have great respect for the first movie, but this one is, what, number 7?<br /><br /><b>W</b>: I think, ultimately, there is this inherent problem with the Alien films, in that they have to somehow get to a mysterious planet where they're all going to get killed.<br /><br /><b>FD</b>: Right.<br /><br /><b>W</b>: And there has to be some motivation for them to get there, and they always go unsuspectingly. There are plot structure elements that are very repetitive from movie to movie. But still, <i>Prometheus </i>was a very daring choice for Ridley Scott as the director, because he kept telling people, it's not really an Alien prequel. And then, the studio executives objected to that, so that at the end of <i>Prometheus</i>, he sneaked in an alien to accommodate the suits. Scott attempted to make a different type of movie set within the Alien universe, and because that film got so much backlash, so much confusion, basically, when people where going in expecting one thing and getting something way more philosophical with inconvenient plot holes and weird character motivations. I imagine that Scott was more recently feeling pressure to make something more akin with those original Alien movies. So, even with trailers, you could tell they were saying "There's a xenomorph, they're landing on a planet, and there are head crabs. We're going back to what you love, people. Come on out to the theater."<br /><div><br /></div><div><b>FD</b>: Isn't that a form of completely selling out? At the same time, <i>Alien: Covenant </i>has some thought-provoking mise en scene--a massive open space with twisted roasted corpses all around that reminds one of Pompeii, massive human head sculptures.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>W</b>: I'm assuming that we're in full spoiler territory here.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YLofGl9r1CI/WTBU1rQFnhI/AAAAAAAAJG0/tx5yzOx4oQoAPGJvwKshn4g5pafuuhBZACLcB/s1600/alien-cast-main.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="180" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YLofGl9r1CI/WTBU1rQFnhI/AAAAAAAAJG0/tx5yzOx4oQoAPGJvwKshn4g5pafuuhBZACLcB/s320/alien-cast-main.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div><b>FD</b>: Michael Fassbender's portrayal of the android David is compelling, but at the same time, <i>Alien Covenant </i>comes across as a bit&nbsp;pretentious, with David playing Wagner and sometimes reciting Shelley's "Ozymandias."</div><div><br /></div><div><b>W</b>: Meanwhile, no one makes science fiction horror movies anymore. And if they do, no one makes them like Ridley Scott. I think <i>Alien: Covenant </i>is something of a bait and switch. It gets you in the door, thinking they're going to touch down on a planet, and bad things are going to happen. The movie starts off that way, but then Scott keeps building upon the mythology he began with <i>Prometheus</i>, which is the idea of creation, of God, the question where do we come from as humans? In <i>Prometheus,</i>&nbsp;David asks one of the scientists, "Why was I made?" The guy is drinking. He's kind of a buffoon, and he answers, "Because we felt like it."&nbsp;&nbsp;And David replies, "How unpleasant it would be if someone told you that was why you were made?" (I'm paraphrasing.) And then, David takes some of the alien goo, and puts it in the scientist's drink.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>At the time, audience members thought what the hell? And what I like about <i>Alien: Covenant </i>is that you have this android preoccupied with creation. We all know that Ridley Scott is obsessed with androids, even going back to <i>Blade Runner </i>(1982). So, Scott appears to be imprinting onto this recent movie his philosophical inclinations and questions, such as do robots have a soul? In <i>Blade Runner</i>, androids were obsessed with living. Due to their short longevity, they just wanted to live, and they weren't given that opportunity, because they are terrorists, basically.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>So now, Scott explores the mystery of creation by developing David who is frustrated with where he came from. So, I can understand why some fans are upset, because Scott is basically and totally doing his own thing.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>FD</b>: But he's repeating his own thing.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>W</b>: He's repeating himself to some extent, but he's also mucking with the alien mythology. He's saying, to hell with all of that James Cameron stuff in <i>Aliens </i>(1986). Also,&nbsp;<i>Alien 3 </i>and <i>4&nbsp;</i>is stupid. I'm going to build my own weird backstory to the Alien ethos with my own agenda.&nbsp;</div><div><i><br /></i></div><div><b>FD</b>: When it comes to David, he's a delightful character. I like him in the scene where all of the humans freak out because an alien pops out of somebody (and <i>Alien: Covenant </i>fully explores other ways that infant aliens can burst out of human flesh in unexpected places. It seems like after awhile, you are going to run out of places to pop out of), but beyond that, I enjoyed how in the midst of a scene where everyone is completely freaking over this gruesome birth, David remains utterly cool. He has nothing to fear. He's completely calm and collected, and therefore delightful.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">To keep going with spoilers, it turns out that David is a complete fan of the aliens. He enables them in various ways. He wants to encourage their reproduction and spread them across the various planets. David wants to treat them as superior beings, but ultimately these aliens never do a whole lot except go [hissing noise] and then kill people. It seems like, if the filmmakers want to treat the aliens as exceptional, then the aliens need to start developing language, but mostly, still, they are fun bugaboo horror villain characters who are not that much different from demented cats.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>W</b>: They have two mouths.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>FD</b>: <i>Alien </i>(1979) was so good about keeping the alien mysterious, and there was also the strong sense of the biological imperative, that the alien has to survive cleverly. Now, with <i>Alien: Covenant</i>, the aliens replicate, and get killed. A lot of that initial interest in their sophistication and mystery has been lost because we're getting used to them.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>W</b>: Yes. That's a problem with prequels. They tend to get rid of the mystery of villains, such as Darth Vader. I think you have to take the first <i>Alien </i>as a completely different beast, no pun intended. It's a slasher movie in space, stripped down, with believable characters, space truckers, etc. It's a minimalist film in comparison to the bloated blockbuster of today.&nbsp;<i>&nbsp;</i>&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kHpVvEvxjis/WTBjJtGza-I/AAAAAAAAJHI/utErK_VrbS4FT9aEVdfgGwWiZpXlPNOwACLcB/s1600/alien-covenant.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="575" data-original-width="1000" height="184" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kHpVvEvxjis/WTBjJtGza-I/AAAAAAAAJHI/utErK_VrbS4FT9aEVdfgGwWiZpXlPNOwACLcB/s320/alien-covenant.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><b>FD</b>: And yet, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) remains such a great female lead, and an influential character. With <i>Alien: Covenant</i>, one kind of remembers Daniels (Katherine Waterston) and Billy Crudup playing a weak captain named Christopher Oram. We also learn that James Franco played another leader who was killed off at the beginning. The crew mourns for him, but I couldn't figure out if we were supposed to be sad or happy because the character played by Franco was killed. I was cheered by the fact that he was dead on arrival like Kevin Costner in <i>The Big Chill </i>(1983).</div><div><br /></div><div><b>W</b>: There are some <a href="http://schmoesknow.com/alien-covenant-prologue-introduces-diverse-crew/48273/">featurettes</a> for <i>Alien: Covenant </i>that effectively set up the characters for the movie in ways in which the film itself does not. The featurette sets up some of the romantic subtexts and the relationships between the crew members, and you don't get any of that in the final product. As for your point about the problems with the villainous alien itself, I think that was probably due to studio pressures to return to the proven formula.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>FD</b>: In every week of 2018, we will get <a href="https://shadowandact.com/black-panther-and-the-the-great-film-crash-of-2008-trouble-ahead/">another</a> tentpole sequel <a href="http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2017/5/30/mid-year-report-blockbuster-bombs-why-did-they-flop.html">blockbuster-wannabe</a>, and <i>Alien: Covenant</i>&nbsp;already seems to point in that direction. Potential audience members will get really really sick of all this rebaked reliable product, infinite repetition and terminal sequelitis.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>W</b>: This movie tries to please everyone.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>FD</b>: So, basically, you're saying that <i>Prometheus </i>proved&nbsp;too original, and so <i>Alien: Covenant </i>retreats from that.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div><b>W</b>: Yes, <i>Prometheus </i>took more chances. The problem with <i>Alien: Covenant </i>is two-fold. The characters are criminally underdeveloped, so when they get picked off, you don't care at all. They're just fodder. Secondly, <i>Alien: Covenant </i>relies too much on the basic horror movie trope of minor characters wandering off without much motivation into dark corners just so they can get killed.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div><b>FD</b>: After all, an exploration of the mystery of creation comes across as lacking if it's driven and defined by craven studio calculation. Ridley Scott deserves more than that.</div><div><br /></div><div><b>W</b>: He most certainly does.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>Other discussions with W. consider&nbsp;<i><a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2012/07/gothams-reckoning-discussion-of.html">The Dark Knight Rises</a></i>&nbsp;(2012), <i><a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2012/09/am-i-not-pretty-enough-discussion-about.html">The Loved Ones</a> </i>(2009),&nbsp;and <i><a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2013/06/mother-nature-is-serial-killer.html">World War Z</a>&nbsp;</i>(1013).</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/P4sNZyTuxcg" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-mystery-of-creation-and-terminal.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-40539466927081837782017-05-29T20:45:00.000-04:002017-05-29T20:45:28.516-04:00A sentence from the Library of America's Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop from Elvis to Jay Z <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-M2SrnhWBxcY/WSy_9e76thI/AAAAAAAAJGg/jUO6Ta-HZQM-fZhUIYAaioZ48vhwaUiTQCLcB/s1600/shake.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="410" data-original-width="260" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-M2SrnhWBxcY/WSy_9e76thI/AAAAAAAAJGg/jUO6Ta-HZQM-fZhUIYAaioZ48vhwaUiTQCLcB/s320/shake.jpg" width="202" /></a></div>I've been very much enjoying the recently published <i>Shake It Up</i>, edited by Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar. It provides a jukebox sampling of lively loopy rock, soul, and folk journalism that shifts giddily from Eve Babitz seducing a cheerfully newly thin Jim Morrison in "Jim Morrison is Dead and Living in Hollywood" to the decidedly grim portrait of the up-and-coming band Led Zeppelin slogging across America (in a way that most definitely does not resemble <i>Almost Famous </i>(2000)) eventually traumatizing Ellen Sander in "Inside the Cages of the Zoo," from Lester Bangs not being all that sympathetic when Elvis died to Ed Ward not finding Bruce Springsteen's <i>Born to Run</i>&nbsp;all great after all. The book is full of twists when one might expect more praise--Chuck Eddy not caring much for the later Ramones, for instance. And the style often comes across as pleasantly drug-addled and deranged. I felt that this one sentence by Camden Joy's piece entitled "Total Systems Failure" deserved honorable mention here:<br /><br />"Then the record companies ran out of Nirvana specialty reissues and Sonic Youth did not make another <i>Daydream Nation </i>and stupid Mark E. Smith assaulted his girlfriend while Elvis Costello forfeited his place in the pantheon and generation-defining classics were on the tips of the Breeders' and Uncle Tupelo's tongues when the band members turned on another as Nick Cave and Morrissey became jokes and Bob Mould and Mike Watt continued on cluelessly and the gifted pop band Christmas came back as the utterly irrelevant smug swingers Combustible Edison and traditionally deserving dues-paying types like Vic Chesnutt and the Fastbacks could not get a commercial purchase on the popular imagination as everybody from the Posies to Pearl Jam to Archers of Loaf never figured out how to make an album entirely important from start to finish, forgetting the point of pop stardom is to bring together huge clumps of otherwise unaffiliated folks, and Pavement couldn't follow up the <i>Pacific Trim </i>EP with the requisite jubilant breakthrough (their <i>Let It Be</i>) and Cat Power and the Mountain Goats defiantly clung to Dylan pre-'65 and Tom Waits was too late with <i>The Black Rider</i>&nbsp;and Yo La Tengo were inexplicably overlooked (how does that begin to happen?) and the fetish for releasing crappy home demos--whose very lack of finish lent them the steady hiss of a gradually disappearing public--succeeded only in stealing mid-decade credibility from keenly perfectionist pop stars like Robyn Hitchcock and Nick Lowe and They Might Be Giants precisely when they issued their masterpieces."<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/wBfmfaCCGyA" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/05/a-sentence-from-library-of-americas.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-35027074996232118432017-05-23T14:11:00.000-04:002017-05-23T14:21:11.677-04:00Film in Deep Focus by Morgan Honaker<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/gbDXv2Ok8-k/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gbDXv2Ok8-k?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>Morgan <a href="https://twitter.com/morganaorgana">Honaker</a> examines the implications of the recycled narrative in recent movies as part of her <i>Film in Deep Focus </i>video essay <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6w0hiN_XhoKLYihBdNOHAg?app=desktop">series</a>. I've been brooding on the extreme repetitiveness of tentpole releases ever since I watched <i>Alien: Covenant</i>&nbsp;last week (a film which has an uncomfortable number of similarities with <i>Alien </i>(1979)). It's a pleasure to see Morgan analyze these trends.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/uWFZQ5rEtFI" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/05/film-in-deep-focus-by-morgan-honaker.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-59233323267853898672017-05-15T11:15:00.000-04:002017-05-15T11:15:11.003-04:00The Film Doctor's 9 Year Anniversary<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-05FQEWf43Xs/WRnFqWtKpPI/AAAAAAAAJGM/netVvu6iT_whVhVQbvEUPhmtY-ngvZbrQCLcB/s1600/1inglorious.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-05FQEWf43Xs/WRnFqWtKpPI/AAAAAAAAJGM/netVvu6iT_whVhVQbvEUPhmtY-ngvZbrQCLcB/s320/1inglorious.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>On May 18, 2008, I began copying my former newspaper movie reviews onto The Film Doctor blog. Now, almost 9 years later, I know better, but I still post things on occasion. Here's a <a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2009/08/revenge-of-giant-face-14-notes-on.html">link</a> to my notes on <i>Inglourious Basterds </i>(2009).<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/B7ssqfKCijw" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com4http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-film-doctors-9-year-anniversary.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-18767016611695044422017-04-18T12:41:00.000-04:002017-04-18T12:41:28.839-04:00complicit links<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cEeSuNzsAnM/WPZBJOo5pHI/AAAAAAAAJEs/MGj8Y3sOflwSl7x2efGYPPVooLc74jrXACLcB/s1600/1thor_ragnarok_trailer_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-cEeSuNzsAnM/WPZBJOo5pHI/AAAAAAAAJEs/MGj8Y3sOflwSl7x2efGYPPVooLc74jrXACLcB/s320/1thor_ragnarok_trailer_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>---Amy Heckerling <a href="http://blog.thefilmstage.com/post/159199115301/amy-heckerling-visits-the-criterion-collection">visits</a> Criterion<br /><br />---<i><a href="http://www.filmscalpel.com/decisions-decisions/">Decisions, Decisions</a></i>&nbsp;by Cristina Alvarez Lopez and Adrian Martin<br /><br />---Matt Zoller Seitz <a href="https://vimeo.com/77015707">considers</a> <i>Rushmore</i><br /><br />---"The female glance is deeply attuned to textures, to shades of light. You can feel the temperature of the bodies around you, the anxiety and claustrophobia or, alternately, the expansiveness and delight. It’s an almost synesthetic mode of filmmaking, focused not on plot, or narrative, but the capacity of an image to convey a feel. It forces identification with, and empathy for, the way women experience the world — an experience that’s often marked by passive observation and the rhythms of the domestic world. Scenes shot in this way can feel paranoiac, distracted, and disjointed, but that’s just the reality of living in a world where your body, your value, your power is constantly surveilled. If the male gaze disassembles and disempowers, then the female glance puts that world back together on its own terms." --from Anne Helen Petersen's "<a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/annehelenpetersen/blessed-be-the-fruit?utm_term=.ofMrl5VA1#.hoyxWPRnJ">The Radical Feminist Aesthetic of <i>The Handmaid's Tale</i></a>"<br /><br />---Richard Kelly's <a href="https://filmschoolrejects.com/filmmaking-tips-richard-kelly-848ee16fab38">filmmaking tips</a><br /><br />---“The <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-studio-disruption-20170326-story.html">problem</a> is audience behavior. People are going to movies less and less, and when they're going, everyone's going to see the same movie.”<br /><br />---"[T]here is mounting anxiety among theater owners, studio executives, filmmakers, and cinephiles that the lights may be starting to <a href="http://variety.com/2017/film/features/movie-business-changing-consumer-demand-studios-exhibitors-1202016699/">flicker</a>."<br /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: Arial, &quot;Helvetica Neue&quot;, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 15px;"><br /></span>---"<a href="https://www.fandor.com/keyframe/anne-hathaway-creation-monsters?utm_campaign=tweet&amp;utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_medium=social">Why does everyone hate Anne Hathaway?</a>"<br /><br />---"<i>Get Out</i>&nbsp;and the Death of White Racial Innocence" by Rich <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/get-out-and-the-death-of-white-racial-innocence">Benjamin</a><br /><br />---"Well, in this case, there was a script, which was the evolutionally history of the universe [audience laughs]. And lately – I keep insisting, only very lately – have I been working without a script [<i>To the Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song</i>], and I’ve lately repented the idea. The last picture we shot, and we’re now cutting, went back to a script that was very well ordered. There’s a lot of strain when working without a script because you can lose track of where you are. It’s very hard to coordinate with others who are working on the film. Production designers and location managers arrive in the morning and don’t know what we’re going to shoot or where we’re going to shoot. The reason we did it was to try and get moments that are spontaneous and free. As a movie director, you always feel with a script that you’re trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. And with no script, there’s no round hole, there’s just air. But I’m backing away from that style now." --Terrence <a href="http://www.andsoitbeginsfilms.com/2017/03/terrence-malick-q-meaning-of-life-and.html?m=1">Malick</a><br /><span style="background-color: white; font-family: &quot;Trebuchet MS&quot;, Trebuchet, Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 15.84px;"><br /></span>---David Bordwell's <a href="https://thefilmstage.com/trailer/first-trailer-for-taika-waititis-thor-ragnarok/">analysis</a> of a scene in <i>A Quiet Passion</i><br /><i><br /></i>---"Looking at To-Be-Looked-At-ness--Feminist Videographic Criticism" by Catherine <a href="http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/intransition/2017/03/12/looking-be-looked-ness-feminist-videographic-criticism">Grant</a><br /><br />---Mark Freeman <a href="http://sensesofcinema.com/2017/1967/the-graduate-mike-nichols-1967/">considers</a> <i>The Graduate</i><br /><i><br /></i>---<i><a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/scarlett-johansson-is-ivanka-trump-complicit-perfume-ad-snl-985387">Complicit</a></i><br /><br />---“I like people pushing, people not conforming,” <a href="http://www.indiewire.com/2017/04/big-little-lies-nicole-kidman-queen-of-the-desert-career-watch-1201804276/">Kidman</a> said. “I love the widening of the boundaries, pushing through the extremism. I love filmmakers and storytelling. I am not interested in popcorn movies. I go to see them and like to be moved by them, but as an actor I examine humanity and why we’re here.”<br /><br />---trailers for <i><a href="http://www.firstshowing.net/2017/first-trailer-for-wwii-thriller-hhhh-or-the-man-with-the-iron-heart/">HHhH</a>, <a href="http://www.firstshowing.net/2017/first-trailer-for-docu-art-hybrid-flames-follows-a-filmmaking-couple/">Flames</a>, <a href="https://thefilmstage.com/trailer/first-trailer-for-taika-waititis-thor-ragnarok/">Thor: Ragnarok</a>, <a href="http://thefilmexperience.net/blog/2017/3/23/frances-mcdormand-mcdonaghs-three-billboards.html">Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri</a>,&nbsp;<a href="http://theplaylist.net/scarlett-johansson-experiences-new-world-final-trailer-ghost-shell-20170327/">Ghost in the Shell</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3-YQj2Asso">Redoubtable</a>, <a href="http://blog.mubi.com/post/158942179066/the-trailer-for-david-lowerys-a-ghost-story">A Ghost Story</a>,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnCdOQsX5kc">It</a>, </i>and&nbsp;<a href="http://www.firstshowing.net/2017/official-trailer-for-i-am-heath-ledger-documentary-about-the-actor/" style="font-style: italic;">I Am Heath Ledger</a><br /><i><br /></i><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-D3FtjWEaOfw/WPY_5znpf-I/AAAAAAAAJEo/muFaDHRKBU8NuoWEDJaSAGnUuOJjfh2JgCLcB/s1600/1thor-ragnarok.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-D3FtjWEaOfw/WPY_5znpf-I/AAAAAAAAJEo/muFaDHRKBU8NuoWEDJaSAGnUuOJjfh2JgCLcB/s320/1thor-ragnarok.jpg" width="320" /></a><i>---"</i>Judge has said that one reliable source of comedy for him is the way humanity simply isn’t prepared for modernity, which ensnares us in vast systems of control in order to sustain itself. What he couldn’t have imagined while making <i>Idiocracy</i>&nbsp;in the early 2000s was that technology was about to thrust humanity into an era for which we are even more ill equipped. It was around that moment that Silicon Valley inventions — blogging platforms, social media, YouTube — began sweeping away old orders and gatekeepers in a way that was both exhilarating (because we were more in charge of our destiny than ever before) and mortifying (because we were, well, more in charge of our destiny than ever before). <i>Idiocracy</i>&nbsp;was released the same year that Time magazine heralded this new age by naming us all the Person of the Year. A decade later, Donald Trump earned that honor, along with the presidency. If anything can explain the short time horizon on which <i>Idiocracy</i>&nbsp;and reality merged — if you believe they have — perhaps it is that technology left us completely, terrifyingly, to our own devices." --from Willy Staley's "<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/magazine/mike-judge-the-bard-of-suck.html?smid=tw-share">Mike Judge, the Bard of Suck</a>"<br /><br />---"<i><a href="https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4461-anatomy-of-a-gag-being-there">Being There</a></i>: American Cypher" by Mark <a href="https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4473-being-there-american-cipher">Harris</a><br /><br />---"The GIF as a Tool of Rereading, Resistance, and Re-narrativizing in Social Media Spaces" by Jasmine Lee <a href="https://blindfieldjournal.com/2017/04/10/the-gif-as-a-tool-of-rereading-resistance-and-re-narrativizing-in-social-media-spaces/">Ehrhardt</a><br /><br />---<i><a href="https://vimeo.com/208186298">The Chameleonic Charlize Theron</a></i><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/VpmWWLwHd88" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/04/complicit-links.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-20784417162309866412017-04-14T18:14:00.000-04:002017-04-18T10:10:47.782-04:00The endlessly exasperating 20th Century Women by Mike Mills<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Y0u0yJQ1AEw/WPFF8jX_PvI/AAAAAAAAJEQ/89l0z6YpsH8ruOyqv0WrpN720TKWlJcPACLcB/s1600/20th.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Y0u0yJQ1AEw/WPFF8jX_PvI/AAAAAAAAJEQ/89l0z6YpsH8ruOyqv0WrpN720TKWlJcPACLcB/s320/20th.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><i>Last weekend, I watched, or tried to sit through Mike Mills' rather lengthy&nbsp;</i>20th Century Women <i>on Blu-ray, in part because I have great respect for many of the actors involved, and also because I liked Mike Mill's <a href="http://1979.fm/">1979 internet radio station</a>. Sitting through the movie, however, proved to be a traumatic experience in which I relived all of the rage and sheer angst provoked by Mike Mills' previous movie entitled </i>Beginners <i>(2010) </i>(<i>Mills' earnest movie-making style gives me the unholy fantods)</i><i>. I did, however, manage to write down some notes on </i>20th Century Women<i>, which follow:&nbsp;</i><br /><br />1) Such acting talents! Such skills in casting! Such a terrible movie.<br /><br />Many years ago, Annette Bening had a role as a seductive soulless con woman in <i>The Grifters </i>(1991). Oh, how I miss those days. &nbsp;Now, Bening plays Dorothea, a Birkenstock-wearing earth mother of 1979, the maternal glue who brings together various quirky characters. She endlessly worries over her frail sensitive 15 year old son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) who is just trying to learn how to be a man just before Reagan's '80s and Mtv hits the scene in Santa Barbara, California.<br /><br />2) A typical scene in <i>20th Century Women</i>:<br /><br /><i>After getting off of his skateboard, Jamie encounters his mother in the kitchen of their funky 1979 house. He gazes soulfully off into the distance, his lip quivering slightly.&nbsp;</i><br /><i><br /></i>"What about my feelings?" <i>cries Dorothea</i>. <i>She lights a menthol cigarette.</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>&nbsp;</i>"I can never have children," <i>cries out Abbie (Greta Gerwig</i>), <i>who plays a red-dyed head artist from New York City estranged for her mother, but who still enjoys dancing, flailing around to 1979 new wave bands like Talking Heads. Later, someone will write "Art Fag" on Dorothea's Volkswagen Bug. This term designates that some prefer Black Flag over Talking Heads, but the problem is that Mike Mills wouldn't know how to depict a genuinely punk character even if she kicked him with her Doc Martens in the head. &nbsp;</i><br /><br />3) I can see exactly why Bening, Elle Fanning, Gerwig, and Billy Crudup would go for Mike Mill's screenplay, because they get to emote and re-examine their deeper feelings in <i>every scene</i>. If their characters' home was on fire, they would probably die because they'd be too busy therapeutically pausing to consider how they might emotionally react to the fire just before it mercifully burnt them alive. Billy Crudup gets to play William, who looks and acts exactly like Russell of the infinitely superior <i>Almost Famous </i>(2000). Why wouldn't Crudup want to return to one of his best roles? William is not sure what to do. Should he sleep with Abbie, or kiss Dorothea, or fix car engines, or make bowls and open a ceramics shop? Or, how about Elle Fanning, who plays Jamie's platonic friend Julie? She likes to lie next to Jamie at night in bed, but she can never get romantically involved with him because he's too smart and sensitive and inclined to explore his feelings, etc. Abbie, meanwhile, <i>can never have children</i>, but that proves (<i>spoiler alert</i>) untrue, but not until after Mills can milk that bit of drama over and over in a very sensitive fashion. Did I mention that all of the characters watch Jimmy Carter's "Crisis of Confidence" <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IlRVy7oZ58">speech</a>? Be advised: <i>everyone dances together </i>towards the end of the movie in a hotel room. Dorothea lights another menthol cigarette. Jamie meanders down a hill on his skateboard.<br /><br />4) Mills has so much trouble bringing this endlessly meandering ensemble drama into some sort of landing after flattering each movie star with his or her star-making scene. . . . .<br /><br /><i>At this point, my notes gave out.&nbsp;</i><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/VLEl1wckcPs" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-endlessly-exasperating-20th-century.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-292518784678319082017-03-25T10:12:00.002-04:002017-03-27T10:54:05.668-04:00Emma Watson and the Evil Disney Hegemony: 5 notes on Beauty and the Beast<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kJ7NNLXog8A/WNef3rUp9zI/AAAAAAAAJD4/hgrAgcS2RrsCmdM9Skf9KvT6ryKclWTUQCLcB/s1600/Beauty-and-the-Beast-post-7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-kJ7NNLXog8A/WNef3rUp9zI/AAAAAAAAJD4/hgrAgcS2RrsCmdM9Skf9KvT6ryKclWTUQCLcB/s320/Beauty-and-the-Beast-post-7.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>1) In a sense, Bill Condon's live-action <i>Beauty and the Beast</i>&nbsp;is Emma Watson's debutante ball, her first major starring role (aside from the beast, and he's diminished by the computer-generated imagery). The French Revolution-era fairy tale also makes <i>Beauty and the Beast</i>&nbsp;Watson's first historical drama. After her work as Hermione Granger, she tended to choose ensemble roles in movies like Sofia Coppola's <i>The Bling Ring </i>(2013), where her character Nicki stood out for her crass American consumerism and vanity, i.e. the opposite of Hermione. Watson didn't seem to fully know it at first, but one could claim that she became the break-out star of the extremely profitable Harry Potter movies in part because J. K. Rowling marginalized Hermione as Potter's sidekick, and therefore she became the most compelling character compared to Ron Weasley (the nondescript redhead played by Rupert Grint) and the rather dutiful Harry. Meanwhile, Daniel Radcliffe has since distinguished himself in the London play production of&nbsp;<i>Equus </i>by gouging out the eyes of horses in the nude, or, more recently, by playing a flatulent corpse in <i>Swiss Army Man </i>(2016), a movie which I have deliberately refused to see (in part because I cannot abide Paul Dano). In other words, of the three original leads of the Harry Potter juggernaut, Emma Watson has come out of it as arguably the most credible star.<br /><br />2) As we get introduced to Belle in her decidedly provincial French town (Gascony), I remembered that the Disney cartoon version of Belle stood out more for her large eyes. I had heard that Watson was the original star in mind for the makers of <i>La La Land</i>, and if one thinks about it, Emma Stone has the freakish anime look that would suit Belle. As Belle walks along singing "There must be more than this provincial life!", the villagers call her odd in part because "her looks have got no parallel" even though she's always got "her nose stuck in a book." Now, when the villagers sang this in the 1991 cartoon version, it was obviously true. In the live-action version, Emma Watson does not exactly stand out in the same way. Director Bill Condon keeps finding ways to emphasize her, at one point making Belle the dominant contrast as the rest of the village freezes as only she walks by, but Watson still strikes me as the kind of character actress who can blend into a movie (such as, say, <i>The Perks of Being a Wallflower </i>(2012))<i>&nbsp;</i>rather than command the focus of a scene as Belle. In short, one thinks of Emma Watson's recent work for the United Nations, and how she's perhaps too smart by half to be in a Cinderella-esque Disney extravaganza at all.<br /><br />3) But perhaps, that's the main clever thing of Bill Condon's version. We've been waiting for a Watson vehicle that places her front and center of a very expensive production, and now that she's in one, she doesn't quite fit, and that tension makes the usual bland Disney pap somehow more effective, and more striking, even with its magic resurrections, its funny CGI sidekicks, its syrupy songs, and its ballroom dancing in the iconic yellow dress with a quickly tamed CGI teddy beast. Belle and Watson do share an extreme high regard for reading and books, but in the limited world of <i>Beauty and the Beast</i>, Belle can only go back and forth between provincial Gascony and an enchanted castle of pre-revolutionary 18th century France (with only a brief sojourn in an attic in Paris). Emma Watson, in dramatic postmodern contrast, has a heck of a lot of more feminist options, including the one of starring in the live-action version of her favorite Disney movie.<br /><br />4) One critic wrote that she has doubts about Watson choosing this Disney vehicle. Doesn't it undermine her intelligence, her edgy roles chosen since the grim dark Potter world mercifully ended in 2011? Isn't Watson selling out to endless Disney hegemonic brainwashing merchandising, its savvy corrupt multi-media synergized machinations that gets otherwise intelligent adults to visit Disney World once or twice a year at obscene expense just so they can feel that Proustian youthful bit of manufactured Disney magic? In the same vein, I still sort of like a McDonald's Big Mac, but I know that's due to skillful TV marketing, advertising of the McBurglar and the smiling red-footed Ronald affecting my innocent brain many years ago before I had any way to resist it. So do so many brainwashed Americans pour into Disney World every year as they pay somewhere around $14,000 to fly in, stay in a hotel on the property for a few days, and see the cartoon characters cavort under the prefab magic castle under fireworks every night with their screaming toddlers, everyone always standing in long lines as they seek to that reclaim elusive Disney joy, that "It's a Small World After All" cheerful, smiling, always smiling, they-had-better-smile-or-else, heavily copyrighted-cartoon-ride of a lifetime.<br /><br />5) When I think of all that highly evil, highly profitable thought control (not to mention the absolute horrors of the <i>Pirates of the Caribbean </i>series that still <i>endures</i>--a purely redundant nightmare), I wonder how I could like the new <i>Beauty and the Beast</i>&nbsp;at all?&nbsp; Yet, I did, perhaps in part due to glibly cheesy half-baked memories of a cartoon that I saw long ago, and that's what so annoying about it.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/5EwAe0BrpSM" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/03/emma-watson-and-evil-disney-hegemony-5.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-54090316960844135702017-03-22T10:24:00.000-04:002017-03-22T19:14:30.853-04:00"That exposed edge of the world": an interview with Adam Houle, author of Stray<div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OQtaqnaHDk0/WNKIEK_HPTI/AAAAAAAAJCA/3J-8BF--bFk8_r_0leUGBioVcZt2O5CbQCLcB/s1600/stray.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-OQtaqnaHDk0/WNKIEK_HPTI/AAAAAAAAJCA/3J-8BF--bFk8_r_0leUGBioVcZt2O5CbQCLcB/s320/stray.jpg" width="214" /></a></div>A friend of mine, Adam Houle, just published his first book of poetry entitled&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.adamhoule.com/">Stray</a>&nbsp;</i>with Lithic <a href="http://www.lithicpress.com/index.php/our-catalog/73-stray">Press</a>. Adam was kind enough to let me interview him for the Film Doctor blog. First, here's an example of Mr. Houle's work:</div><div><br /></div><div>The One Where the Girl Died in Woods Close to Home<br /><br />It started when a filament popped<br />in the lone headlight<br />of the snow sled,<br /><br />quietly, beneath the engine’s roar<br />and the grind of the single-track<br />trundle churning snow<br /><br />as the girl left late<br />to make it home.<br />The blizzard, my mother<br /><br />says, buried her<br />back-trail and without<br />a light she could not find<br /><br />her trace. That filament,<br />the fine hair finely split,<br />brought on a deeper night,<br /><br />and with it the wind conspired.<br />The wind banked great drifts.<br />It rearranged the known world’s face.</div><div><br />Here's the interview:</div><div><br /></div><div><b>FD</b>: What do you think of the contemporary resistance to poetry? What advantages do poetry have over prose?<br /><br /><b>AH</b>: What resistance there is is a particular type that seems steeped in distrust. Distrust that there’s a “hidden meaning” that the poem or poet or teacher will use as a weapon; distrust that poems don’t “do anything”; perhaps distrust because advocates for poems over-sell a piece or group of pieces and, when that piece doesn’t have the earth-shattering results promised, the hearer suspects either the poem or the self are defective in some way. Too often I think poems are presented as puzzle boxes painted black with a busted latch that’s latched from the inside anyway, and so what’s the point? But poems need time and space, and they are best met on their own terms. They’re not instrumental; rather they are worthwhile unto themselves as themselves. The act of reading carefully and with empathetic attention slows us down, it asks more of us, and I find a lot of pleasure in that process. Sitting down to read a poem need not be a hallowed event separate from the world. A poem can be a prismed look into that world, and I find my eyes are fresher when I’m also spending time reading and writing poems.</div><div><br /></div><div>I think too that there’s a perception that poems are narcissistic little things written by narcissistic little souls, but that’s just absurd. I mean, if you go see a movie, and it’s a bad one, you don’t swear off all movies, right? You read a bad novel, and you think: that’s it. Prose is awful. That sounds really shortsighted. But it seems like we don’t have a problem doing that to poems. There is a lot of great work out there, and new pieces published all the time. There are magazines publishing excellent poems issue after issue, poems that could speak to all sorts of folks from all sorts of backgrounds and experiences. So, should you come across one that you don’t like, big deal. Move on. It’s such a rich field.<br /><br />But I think that’s true of prose, too. The advantage that, say, a lyric poem has over a twenty-page short story is a temporal one. The physical act of reading down the page takes less time with a poem, which I think also works against the poem in that someone might, wrongly, assume it has less heft or significance or something like that. It’s just a little song, after all. But I think experiencing poems on their own ground should be a part of all our lives. Sometimes, I, with great sneakiness, start my classes a few minutes early and just read a poem I recently enjoyed. I say: Hey, listen to this cool thing I read. And then I read that cool thing. No commentary, no quiz, no paper assigned. Just a minute and a half or whatever to listen to a poem.</div><div><br /></div><div>So that’s an advantage. I mean, I can’t take a few minutes before class to read&nbsp;<i>Moby-Dick</i>, right? Poems are companions to a thoughtful life, and I guess I get bummed when I hear someone say how awful poetry is. That said, I don’t need to get too bent out of shape. Poetry doesn’t need me to defend it. It’s crafty and wily, and it will be okay with or without me.</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zzB7vdX9t1w/WNKF5ztrDTI/AAAAAAAAJB8/6TEoW78t7eQlWCOUxYqcLS5WTUcNaQbHwCLcB/s1600/AdamHouleWEBSITE.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="226" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zzB7vdX9t1w/WNKF5ztrDTI/AAAAAAAAJB8/6TEoW78t7eQlWCOUxYqcLS5WTUcNaQbHwCLcB/s320/AdamHouleWEBSITE.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div><b>FD</b>: How would you describe your aesthetics?<br /><br /><b>AH</b>: I don’t know. That’s the short answer. The longer is this: I’m trying to get the words right in their right orders. I like speakers jolted to speak, to make structure of experience or psychological states, of both, to enlist artifice and authenticity. Poems are stylized, they’re crafted things that should seem essential, that they could not be otherwise. There’s pruning and distillation, a tautness in the language that, for me, is primarily important. And that starts with the line—and as the lines tumble down the page, I like when I’m engaged by vibrancy in voice, in image, in sound, in the singleness of the poetic moment being offered up, that builds on itself and organizes its own internal logic. Show me a possible world. Show me a possible self. I think poems memorialize through attention to how they operate. I like knottiness and texture, part luxury purse and part mucky rucksack that carry and convey something essential about the world in which they exist.<br /><br /><b>FD</b>: Why do so many of your poems have such cold imagery?<br /><br /><b>AH</b>:&nbsp;<i><a href="http://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780997501711/stray.aspx">Stray</a></i>&nbsp;isn’t really a warm book, is it? When I was organizing the poems, culling, structuring the book’s arc, looking for unnoticed recurrences, thematic echoes and the like, it became quite clear to me how much I identify with the sharpness of the winter world. It wasn’t intentional in the composition, revising, editing process. But I saw I had written a lot of poems, and it was time to get them into a larger shape, to curate and structure a manuscript. And there’s something evocative about a winter landscape. It’s brutal and unforgiving and elegant and austere. The sight lines are crisp, and in winter I truly feel like I’m on a planet, a living rock hurtling through space. So you have that exposed edge of the world sort of feeling, and then, if we increase the magnification, there are quiet dramas and sorrows and joys unfolding right there. I think much of&nbsp;<i>Stray</i>&nbsp;tries to come to find a shape for that.<br /><br />In college, I lived in this little back apartment in Green Bay for a couple years. Half the place was heated on my dime; the other half by the landlord (illegal addition, electric heat, you get the drift). So, I blocked the warm half, killed the heat I had to pay for, and swept snow out of my kitchen most mornings from November through March. The cold must have seeped into my psyche.<br /><br /><b>FD</b>: Why do you tend to favor formal poetry, such as the sonnet?<br /><br /><b>AH</b>: Formal considerations help me speak to tradition; poems are shaped things—they have contours that I like to think make expressive and evocative sense. For me, the sonnet and its relatives in&nbsp;<i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Stray-Adam-Houle/dp/0997501715/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1490224387&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=adam+houle+stray">Stray</a></i>&nbsp;offer a counterpoint to the thematic straying throughout the collection. It’s a formal return, then, and I hope offers echo, or a refrain of sorts, to the collection as a whole; there’s a rhetoric to the sonnet that makes sense to me. It’s nimble, it’s flexible, and it offers compression that, when it’s well wrought, lets the poem sing spontaneously within a frame. That’s the authenticity and artifice I mentioned earlier—it’s a worthwhile tension, a richness that I admire in so many poems I read.<br /><br /><b>FD</b>: What do you make of the poetic tendency to write about animals?<br /><br /><b>AH</b>: Wonder. That’s the first word that comes to mind. I’m in awe of life, and I think about the ways the world we make brushes against the world we find. For me, it’s attentiveness and openness to what’s missed in the day-to-day—the snippets of song and the suggested narratives of the animal world. I don’t think I’m doing the animals in my poems any great favors by writing about them. I’m just trying to pay homage to the world, to memorialize it in some small way. At the same time, I’m also aware that I’m responding to some necessary part of myself.<br /><br /><b>FD</b>: Could you guide us through the writing process for, say, "The Least of Wonders," or is that a dumb intrusive question?<br /><br /><b>AH</b>: That’s neither dumb nor intrusive. For each draft, for me at least, the process is dictated by the poem. I try to see clearly what a draft’s doing. Most drafts start with an image, a small bit of a line, a phrase that sort of sticks sideways in my mind. That ends up in the notebook, and as I follow the sound or the sense, I realize that it’s something that should get over to the computer. Perhaps it’s only a few stanzas, but I’ll type it, print it, and work on it more in pen. Changing the medium helps. Carrying the draft with both print and handwritten stanzas gives me some distance and clarity. “The Least of Wonders” first appeared in&nbsp;<i>Jelly Bucket</i>&nbsp;out of Eastern Kentucky University as a very different poem. The revisions that I hope made it a stronger poem happened in fits, with lots of other poems drafted in between. Those in between poems taught me things “The Least of Wonders” needed.<br /><br />After grad school, the early morning hours of concentrated work became harder to find, so I’ve had to be more diligent in my conscientious working habits. Part of that is being okay with working in small spaces—a half hour here, jotting down nonsense rhymes for fun when I’m waiting for a meeting to start, that sort of thing. One thing it’s shown me, though, is how important poems are to me.<br /><br /><b>FD</b>: Advice for young poets?<br /><br /><b>AH</b>: Read widely and without prejudice. Write diligently. Don’t apologize for doing either. That’s advice to me, too. I feel very young.<br /><br /><b>FD</b>: What motivates you to sit down and revise and develop your next collection on a pleasant spring day when you could be relaxing and enjoying yourself outside instead?<br /><br /><b>AH</b>: I can do both, though. I find the hard work of trying to write poems well a true pleasure. My home office has a window, and I can look out there, see what the neighbor cats are getting into. I can take the notebook to the porch. I can take the dogs walking while hashing through some ideas, thinking about lines, or trying to think nothing at all and otherwise taking in the day on its own. For me, it’s not a beautiful spring day that gets in the way; it’s the other obligations. I take those obligations seriously, and it’s an honor to do so. But I also need emotional and psychological space to work, to say nothing of time. But the work gets done because it must. I’m happier and more effective when I have poems waiting.<br /><br /><b>FD</b>: What do you think of promoting your work through readings, interviews, etc.? (I'm thinking of Don DeLillo, who I hear refuses to promote his work.)<br /><br /><b>AH</b>: I think a lot about my intention when it comes to promotion. More important than promoting my work, I hope I’m promoting poems and community and attentiveness, maybe a line or stanza or whole poems sort of rattle around and glom on to the mind and heart of a hearer. That’s what happened to me, at least, in high school to a certain degree and certainly in college and grad school, when our reading series brought in writers who memorialized things that mattered to them, and their verve, energy, and generosity at the podium and in the classrooms changed me in small, important ways. I felt less alone, less lost in my head—here were folks who worked hard to share a flash of vision, a structuring moment that resonated, invisible strings vibrating across the auditorium or wherever. So there we all are, engaged, entertained, listening to language structured, I hope, to do something of consequence, to broaden us, deepen us, humor us, mark us in some small way. It seems really human to do that, to want that, and I support being human.<br /><br />The same human urge is true for interviews. We’re curious. We like insight. We like knowing things about books that evoked something in us. That seems reasonable. But it’s also reasonable for an author to dislike the whole process. I read once that James Joyce was asked why&nbsp;<i>Ulysses</i>&nbsp;was so long. Joyce responds with something like if he could have paraphrased it he wouldn’t have had to write it. So, what’s DeLillo have to say about&nbsp;<i>Underworld</i>&nbsp;that he didn’t say in&nbsp;<i>Underworld</i>? Also, who wouldn’t prefer getting the work done to talking about how some work gets done? I feel that way, but I also think generosity matters. And we must eat. For many, I think it’s both pragmatic and idealistic to both give readings and provide interviews to promote the work at hand but also literature or art in general. Good readings and good interviews can do both: sincerely promote a single work as part of a larger thing happening in the world, a diverse and faceted and rebellious thing where people get words on pages.<br /><br /><b>FD</b>: Why do you repeat words on a given line? Can you give an example?<br /><br /><b>AH</b>: The best example of that repetition in&nbsp;<i>Stray</i>&nbsp;is probably “Earthworm Flooded Out in Rain.” So, there, the speaker’s sort of lamenting the crappiness of how an earthworm dies after a big rain washed it out. I always thought that sucked. You make it through the flood, but then you’re up on the sidewalk or whatever, and the sun bakes you because you can’t get back to the dirt. So, in that one, it’s a pooling of sonic energy. For me, the repetition of “dappled” in such a short space creates an insistence, a cycling or charging of sorts. It allows the speaker and the reader to spiral for a moment before moving on. It has the same effect in “Night Studies,” but with different expressive potential. It’s echoing the memorizing work the beloved does with her Latin studies. I see that sort of repetition, in a general sense, as internal rhyme. That the preceding consonant sounds would make the two appearances of “dappled” not actually be rhyme seems inaccurate. I mean, maybe it’s uninteresting as a rhyme, but I don’t think that’s true either. In any event, that sort of repetition adds a sonic insistence that I like—it’s a bit hypnotic, a bit hymn-like, or chant-like.<br /><br /><b>FD</b>: What do you think of rhyme in contemporary poetry?<br /><br /><b>AH</b>: Poems make patterns; they have a shape, a form, a feel. Rhyme can be lovely and memorable and fresh. I remember reading a review of a book that used rhyme as a dominant patterning throughout the collection. The reviewer said it’s like listening to a friend with a lot of neat things to say who just happened to speak in rhyme. I loved that description because it touches on both the artifice and authenticity of the poems. Rhyme creates expectations for the reader, and when those expectations are both met and messed with, the results can be so satisfying as a reader and as a writer. There’s a tension between the orderly movement and the vagaries of the piece itself, and that’s exciting. It offers a framework for the play of the lines, and the play of the piece as a whole. And when that’s handled well, I’m invested as a reader. I respond to both the unexpectedness, the jolt of the poem, and the fulfillment of the sonic contract the poem made.<br /><br />That said, a poem using pure end-rhyme that does so with less-than-successful results calls far more attention to itself than, say, an unmemorable open form poem. That poorly-rhymed poem sort of blinks like a church out in the county that uses neon signs. Well, not like that. I’d like to see that. I think, though, that the sound for poems like that are probably the least of the concerns. Usually, the rhetoric of the poem, the emotional / intellectual movements are sort of weak. The expected rhymes can be symptomatic of expected responses or nebulous, generic responses to the situation at hand. We’re probably lacking concrete significant details, a directed speaker, etc…we’re lacking a lot of things likely because the poem grew too enamored with its own end rhyme. The Love/Dove, June/Moon sort of stuff. But the whole line matters—I mean, what if we go:<br /><br />“Honey Boo-Boo weighs down the mind of Mama June/ who smokes out back and aims her cherry at the moon”—so now we have rhyming hexameter couplets about the tv stars using the dread June/Moon rhyme. We also have a little drama unfolding, and the strange gesture in the image of the Mama June lady pointing her cigarette at the moon while mulling over her daughter. Maybe it could work. What we’re really worried about with rhyme, though, is “I loved you with all my heart all June / and we kissed under the summer moon,” right? A little vague, a little expected. But I’d say that the unsuccessful end-rhyme is one of a few things that could be addressed.<br /><br /><b>FD</b>: How often do you abandon poems?<br /><br /><b>AH</b>: Every chance I get. I take ‘em to the swamps, tell them they’re better off without me, and fold them into paper boats and send them on their way. I sprinkle them with turtle food too, so they get eaten.<br /><br />I’ve become pretty diligent about seeing poems through a few different drafts before I either full-on commit or put them into the abandonment file on my computer. I’ll filter through there from time to time to see what might strike me. But, for the most part, I abandon a poem when I lose interest. I don’t really see misshapen stanzas or a few lines going nowhere as a poem I abandon, though. That’s exercise or a start to something that will come around again. So, I think that when a poem or starts are going nowhere, I’m just recycling them, composting them. If the image, line, metaphor, or genesis are urgent enough or deeply rooted enough, they’ll come around again. Right now, there are some poems I refound from last year. They’re works in progress. So, they were abandoned, but when I went through some old draft work, I found them, read them, and didn’t cringe at some of the work there. I’ll revisit.<br /><br /><b>FD</b>: Do you find some subjects (such as, say, multinational corporations) not conducive for poetry? Are you careful about the ideological implications of your work?<br /><br /><b>AH</b>: I try to get the poem right. I try to be emotionally and intellectually honest. I try to be accurate and find fruitful juxtapositions of sounds and sense. It’s an ideology of attentiveness, and I think that matters. I respond to the world in specifics, though. I don’t think in terms of movements or ideologies. That’s not say there aren’t implications, because of course there are. I write from my own limited, tentative, and tenuous grasp on the world, and that’s bound to change over the course of my life. So I hope that my work rings honest, sincere, and well crafted with people. I hope the voice is compelling. I hope readers enjoy the poems, that something sticks with them, slows them down a bit. But I don’t sit down to write and say, okay! Let’s write one that a Marxist would really appreciate. Or I really want to burn the Tea Party folks with this.<br /><br />Speaking of Marxists, I don’t think multinational corporations are inherently off limits to poems. They’re part of the world, after all, for better or worse. Do I feel moved to write about them? Not overtly, not consciously. Images have found their way into poems that conjure corporate-y things. But that’s in service to that particular poem and not part of a larger project. I think it’s less about subject and more about execution. Compel me. Move me. Show me the private history of one against the backdrop of a world in crisis. Teach me something about being on earth.</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/DnTfHUOQ2ic" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/03/that-exposed-edge-of-world-interview.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-80417835035321042002017-03-04T10:41:00.001-05:002017-03-07T02:08:38.566-05:00The Beguiled official teaser trailer, related links, notes on Somewhere (2010)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CWB-c98SwK8/WLwwgETZ4CI/AAAAAAAAJBg/SPt2eUQvHBoC5CXuwBTsBMsz5mpxbONmQCLcB/s1600/4107_d014_03945_r_crop.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-CWB-c98SwK8/WLwwgETZ4CI/AAAAAAAAJBg/SPt2eUQvHBoC5CXuwBTsBMsz5mpxbONmQCLcB/s320/4107_d014_03945_r_crop.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Looking forward to this by one of my favorite directors:<br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/GRKXyeoWfco/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GRKXyeoWfco?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><br />Related links:<br /><br />"<a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2015/12/8-existential-questions-about-sofia.html">8 Questions about <i>A Very Murray Christmas</i></a>"<br /><br />"<a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-lifestyle-that-everybody-kinda.html">The lifestyle everybody kinda wants": <i>The Bling Ring</i></a>"<br /><br />more Sofia Coppola <a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2013/06/sofia-coppola-links.html">links</a><br /><br />Also, some notes on&nbsp;<i>Somewhere </i>(2010):<br /><br /><div>1) After watching <i>Somewhere</i>, I mostly remember Johnny Marco's (Stephen Dorff's) J. Crew boots. His sense of style has a deadbeat working class stoner aesthetic that reminds me of the guys who wore lots of flannel and jeans back in high school. He wears one expensive Red Wing boot untied and dangling, the other underneath the jean leg as he stumbles about from his black Alfa Romeo to his Chateau Marmont suite in his stubbled sun-struck LA Bret Easton Ellis celebrity-decadent world. In some ways, <i>Somewhere</i> is a more faithful low-key version of Ellis's <i>Less Than Zero</i> than the incoherent 1987 movie version starring Robert Downey Jr. Marco is so jaded with movie star fame, he passes out as Playboy dancers gyrate on stripper poles in from of him, or he zonks out snoring in the midst of undressing another woman during a party. Often as not, he's asleep when he's not sitting on a sofa and staring blankly into space with an opened Corona in one hand.<br /><br />2) If Johnny didn't have Stephen Dorff's charm and Elle Fanning as Cleo, his daughter, needing his parental attention, he would be an insufferably blank self-involved poltroon.<br /><br />3) As he sinks deeper into his characteristic stupor, one thing becomes clear: in Sofia's films, sex is always the enemy because it falsifies what little authenticity that can exist between wealthy, famous folk. As an alternative, she prefers to depict two people seeking an innocent prelapsarian playfulness amidst all of the adult fakery. In <i>Lost in Translation</i>, Bob asks Charlotte if she wants to escape from the insufferable Park Hyatt Tokyo Hotel, and to some extent, by dashing aimlessly around the city and laughing cruelly at the phonies like Kelly (Anna Faris), they succeed. But Coppola's vision requires that she persuade her relatively poor audience to become just as alienated from this super-rich world as she is (not an easy thing to cajole us into). In <i>Somewhere</i>, I think we are meant to admire Johnny's decadent lifestyle even as it proves hollow, with awkward overly long shots emphasizing his boredom and his race car running in circles. Only his fatherly obligation makes him rise above his besotted hedonism on rare occasions. Still, to share in his alienation still seems like asking a lot.<br /><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img height="353" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/wh1gZnPRlQoyeZGjGbSKJmS-SXu9AfxHUad232omT2YKf4jC3nE0OOC2itIT0BWOq9-eEsG33UT1CwwZjFrO89Dg-0SnYbvc2xAP9vHA-kDVO69MTzrLzO9qcQSIJuEC" style="-webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad); border: none; transform: rotate(0.00rad);" width="533" /></span></div><div><br /></div>4) Somewhere left me wondering about Sofia Coppola's growing self-consciousness as an artist, her willingness to repeat herself by showing what she, as Francis Ford Coppola's daughter, could know about: the Eloise-like <a href="http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi2528614425/">milieu</a> of award ceremonies, photo-ops, and top-notch Italian hotel suites with swimming pools. When we see the hungover Johnny watch Chloe ice-dance to Gwen Stefani's "Cool," the moment comes off as too self-consciously pure after all of Johnny's recent decadence. Johnny is such a bonehead, we can't even tell if he can properly appreciate his daughter's ministrations on his behalf (Chloe comes across as unfairly smarter and more mature than her dad). At one point, she attempts to domesticate his hotel room by ordering a cheese grater to help fix some macaroni and cheese. Later, Chloe shows off her artistic bent by fixing him some gourmet-quality Eggs Benedict, complete with chives garnish cut with kitchen shears. But, even given these moments of grace, where does Johnny have to go with his life? We never once see him read a book, or show much cultural interest in anything. He's a docile puppet of the publicity machine.<br /><br />5) My issues with Johnny reminded me of Pauline Kael's problems with Benjamin Braddock in her review of <i>The Graduate</i> (and both films share a tendency to have lingering shots of their hero drifting around a pool). If Ben had any ideas, we would hate him, but as long he remains blank, the audience can project what they like on him, but Ben is eventually defined by his rejection of the rich California lifestyle of his parents while Johnny embraces it. And in contrast to Bill Murray's expert depiction of a midlife crisis in <i>Lost in Translation</i>, there's no tension in Johnny's befuddled acceptance of the perks of his job. Meanwhile, Johnny's Los Angeles mise-en-scene is too close to that of Bret Easton Ellis's recent <i>The Informers</i> for comfort. When Johnny finally removes his sated mask of cool and cries while on the phone with his publicist (I think), late in <i>Somewhere</i>, he says "I'm f---ing nothing." A sad scene, but after spending so much of the movie looking disaffected, Johnny's moment of vulnerability has little effect.<br /><br /><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img height="287" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/uvquL9FR_86a4wg9Sr57Zp6xHyDXIvcdYvvk0lg2kXOGDMa9wCUUY0u89VMGoHHAzJ6Wtmt3OrTOiP5Lhy70yogEzRwnTunGhZHzQFNONEkLsGJeAKZ6fMXu1kEIliOJ" style="-webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad); border: none; transform: rotate(0.00rad);" width="533" /></span></div><div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>6) What I wrote about <i><a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2009/08/decadence-in-early-80s-notes-on.html">The Informers</a></i> also applies to <i>Somewhere</i>: "the problem with all of Ellis' depictions of youthful narcissism and <i>Play It As It Lays</i>-Joan Didion-esque `deep' posturing (with everyone endlessly lighting cigarettes and gazing with apathy off into the distance) lies in his difficulty in making anyone care about these characters who certainly do not care about each other. Moreover, this aesthetic based on youth does not age well." To be fair, Johnny's relationship with Chloe redeems him a little, and <i>Somewhere</i> is light years better than <i>The Informers</i> in terms of craft. It just strikes me that Sofia Coppola is capable of creating so much more.<img height="1" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/peFaFK4dwCravm1_LackJjL-7lWHQrTbcw_OJZnPilRBdS2NyRmF1e9kL6HLMpd37u1n8zUX70PJlzSWoJGmuKn8WJyE9AyTgJ4VTJRbshYzIMIoshJvnN4PCTC1puCO" style="border: none; font-family: Arial; font-size: 14pt; transform: rotate(0rad); white-space: pre-wrap;" width="1" /><span style="font-family: &quot;arial&quot;; font-size: 14pt; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img height="1" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/AOgOvdxb1yXoYG-5NXHJwS9T-gk--GF6ayE9ewoCgwKXeV8py99K7KkieotT8H_zbrvtPXUVrE_1TzgWuQHQds-JX6K1DBSf-gjasIFyQUV05jhpTfjdwWS0LnoKdS7Q" style="-webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad); border: none; transform: rotate(0.00rad);" width="1" /></span></div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/w8qnqnEDmc4" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-beguiled-official-teaser-trailer.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-34000937099443753942017-03-01T03:34:00.001-05:002017-03-01T10:05:04.696-05:00"Not my first rodeo": notes on Terrence Malick's Song to Song trailer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hodY4G0ga4c/WLaDMrxH4gI/AAAAAAAAJA0/T3Ymu57FjRUHTlCGo3F_onFnsgOLL3ydACLcB/s1600/1Song-to-Song-4-620x413.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hodY4G0ga4c/WLaDMrxH4gI/AAAAAAAAJA0/T3Ymu57FjRUHTlCGo3F_onFnsgOLL3ydACLcB/s320/1Song-to-Song-4-620x413.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>"Not my first rodeo," I thought, when watching the new Terrence Malick <a href="https://youtu.be/V9t4SKWryWM">trailer</a> for his upcoming movie <i><a href="https://twitter.com/songtosongmovie">Song to Song</a></i>. I've been down this road before. I have forced myself to sit through Malick's recent films. I wasn't born yesterday, and, frankly, I don't buy into the hype about this new one, no matter how much Rooney Mara, Natalie Portman, Michael Fassbender, and Ryan Gosling (not to mention Iggy Pop and John Lydon) romp around in the midst of rock concerts, drive playfully in convertibles, or flirt during parties or whatever. Given what <a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-terrence-malick-files.html">happened</a> with <i>Knight of Cups </i>(2015), I doubt that <i>Song to Song</i>&nbsp;has a script. Instead (I imagine) Malick gave his high level cast a hand-typed sheet of quotes from Horace or Cicero, and then set them loose with his cinematographer/steadicam operator as they tried to make something out of next to nothing--their increasing desperation (Gosling chewing on Mara's foot or whatever) providing the real entertainment. Uh, a love triangle between Rooney, Fassbender, and Gosling perhaps? Malick enjoys watching these stars squirm, and it makes for a pretty, pretty trailer, but we will learn (once again, soon enough) the limits of a movie without a screenplay.<br /><br />Recently, <a href="https://twitter.com/RayPride">Ray Pride</a> (of the excellent <i><a href="http://moviecitynews.com/">Movie City News</a></i>) and I had a little exchange on Twitter on this very topic, a discussion that could foreshadow many a critical disagreement to come about <i>Song to Song</i>. Ray had posted the link to the trailer, and I wrote in reply:<br /><br />Me: "where one gets to hobnob with screenplay-free movie stars improvising feverishly in pretty locations."<br /><div><br /></div><div>Mr. Pride responded: "I marvel at <i>Knight of Cups</i> and its slipstream of thought/regret made possible only by Malick's wild over-shooting and months upon months of finessing."</div><div><br /></div><div>Me: "Yes, still, I tend to favor the emperor's clothes view of Malick. Much depends on how much the viewer is willing to buy into his pretension, and I like a good screenplay."</div><div><br /></div><div>Ray: "And if you look at his earlier pages, you can tell he can write a screenplay. RADEGUND is reportedly the first of his fully-scripted chamber dramas to get produced."</div><div><br /></div><div>Me:&nbsp;"Yes, but why bother now if he can get a-list stars to strain for effect for him? Why not embody pure spontaneity instead? <i>Knight of Cups</i> ended up being very pretty pretty pretension. Christian Bale was not happy."</div><div><br /></div><div>Ray:&nbsp;"I <a href="http://newcityfilm.com/2016/03/09/time-regained-the-undertow-of-terrence-malicks-knight-of-cups/">wrote up</a> my rationalization for <i>KOC</i>. Another eccentric perspective: those two movies were shot almost back-to-back, what, three years ago? Maybe at his age he’s now interested in making a few more finite productions rather than leaving a mass of sprawl behind."</div><div><br /></div><div>Me: "I think he's just cashing in on his mystique. Real inspiration vanished back around the days of <i>Badlands</i>."</div><div><br /></div><div>After that, our conversation ended amicably.</div><div><br /></div><div>So, perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps the emperor Malick <a href="http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/knight-of-cups-2016">wears clothes</a> after all, and all will be redeemed when&nbsp;<i>Song to Song</i>&nbsp;opens in New York and Los Angeles on March 17<i>.</i>&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>But I doubt it.</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/4WcOWZzMo1w" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com1http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/03/not-my-first-rodeo-notes-on-terrence.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-22077273577962587502017-02-26T22:37:00.000-05:002017-02-27T04:57:51.336-05:00Video production notes: Entrapment directed by Morgan Honaker<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-M9QzCCsw9ms/WLOVatmbzHI/AAAAAAAAI_8/qiLDs8s0mJ0JpnxKi3pw2eWtXuMOxHEHACLcB/s1600/1photo%2B%252817%2529.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-M9QzCCsw9ms/WLOVatmbzHI/AAAAAAAAI_8/qiLDs8s0mJ0JpnxKi3pw2eWtXuMOxHEHACLcB/s320/1photo%2B%252817%2529.JPG" width="239" /></a></div>Five years ago, I taught a rather small video production class who wrote, story boarded, and shot a horror film at a local mansion in a small town in South Carolina. Morgan <a href="https://twitter.com/morganaorgana">Honaker</a> directed it, and I appreciated her perfectionist style under those essentially amateur conditions, never accepting any shot until it suited her. She says that she is embarrassed by this video now, but I still like its suspense and its abrupt and bleak ending. I could discuss problems with the acting, but given the tight time constraints, the impatience of those involved, and everything else, I still say that <i>Entrapment </i>is one of the best movies made in my video production class, in part because I showed it to a more recent group, and one of the students screamed twice in the course of viewing it.<br /><br />Here's the <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5fWDy0ango_YlllbVllQ1FsVmc/view?usp=sharing">link</a> to the video.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/mmmJAP16Pcg" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/02/video-production-notes-entrapment.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-74949089232622406412017-02-21T08:38:00.000-05:002017-02-21T08:44:24.711-05:00Video production notes: "A body lying on the street": Third Night by Afterglow Films<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--4kTSOet2CU/WKxDh5e3zAI/AAAAAAAAI-8/cSTs5BfWDHUBx17CcTCQHOPT36L4qv3UQCLcB/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2017-02-21%2Bat%2B8.20.18%2BAM.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/--4kTSOet2CU/WKxDh5e3zAI/AAAAAAAAI-8/cSTs5BfWDHUBx17CcTCQHOPT36L4qv3UQCLcB/s320/Screen%2BShot%2B2017-02-21%2Bat%2B8.20.18%2BAM.png" width="320" /></a></div>About four years ago, Afterglow Films of my video production class made&nbsp;<i>Third Night&nbsp;</i>(directed by&nbsp;<a href="https://twitter.com/ryngonzalez">Ryan Gonzalez</a>). The video concerns romantic obsession that reminds me a little of&nbsp;<i>Vertigo</i>:<br /><br /><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/i0At44HJRRA/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/i0At44HJRRA?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div>Here's an&nbsp;<a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2013/01/video-production-class-weblog-day-2.html">interview</a>&nbsp;with the director. In comparison to&nbsp;<a href="https://vimeo.com/okkeyes">OK Keyes</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://vimeo.com/user14930738">Morgan Honaker</a>, Ryan liked to shoot fast and loose, making him the more Godardian director of the bunch.<br /><br />Also, here's a blog&nbsp;<a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2010/01/video-production-class-day-seven-and.html">post</a>&nbsp;about the long night in which Erik spent much of his time lying on the cold street in his pajamas as Ryan and his film crew shot the van accident (note: I changed names at the time to protect the guilty):<br /><br /><h3 class="post-title entry-title" itemprop="name" style="color: #cc6600; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 20.16px; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.4em; margin: 0.25em 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 4px;">Video production class--day seven and eight--high definition roadkill</h3><div class="post-header" style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14.4px;"><div class="post-header-line-1"></div></div><div class="post-body entry-content" id="post-body-3075634955860703990" itemprop="description articleBody" style="line-height: 1.6em; margin: 0px 0px 0.75em;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_gTka0I9Xl-8/S05es9YcjdI/AAAAAAAACSA/HVwqTkJMhew/s1600-h/filmart.jpg" style="color: #999999; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14.4px; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5426378727512378834" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/_gTka0I9Xl-8/S05es9YcjdI/AAAAAAAACSA/HVwqTkJMhew/s400/filmart.jpg" style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); cursor: pointer; float: left; height: 400px; margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; padding: 4px; width: 312px;" /></a>"That's not blood. It's just red."<br />---Jean-Luc Godard<br /><br />1) How does one shoot a scene where a young man stumbles out of a house at night and gets run over by a van? After a long day of shooting tracking shots of soccer players running (using my car) and a chase scene through the hallways of the school, we loaded up the cast and crew in a van and drove across town to the house of a student whose family was kind enough to let us use the premises. I learned en route that a millionaire lived across the street who might call the cops on us if he sees a body lying on the street. Once there, at about five pm, with the light of the cold overcast day dimming fast, we videotaped Kyle in his pajamas repeatedly stumbling out the front door and gradually working his way towards the street.<br /><br />Then we parked the van past the "accident" and asked Kyle to lie on the asphalt face down with one arm twisted sideways and not move. Over and over again, the driver stepped out of the van in horror, leaving the door open with the beeping warning sound supplying the only sound, and he would check for Kyle's pulse and step back, aghast, before finding the mysterious photo underfoot. As the director and the cameraman positioned the camera from various angles around the body, a car would appear down the street, and hesitate. Perhaps the driver wondered about this body lying there in the middle of the road with a bunch of cold students standing around it grinning. We had several self-conscious awkward moments like that until we could persuade the drivers to drive on by, with us shielding Kyle's body in the process. At one point, the millionaire did appear when we needed to shoot a take from the front of his lawn, but he proved nice enough and didn't mind. Afterwards, the family of the student graciously invited us in from the cold to eat some rice krispy cakes and peanut butter clusters in their home. After shooting one last take of Kyle stumbling down a hallway in his sleep-walking delirium, we finished for the day.<br /><br />2) Today, the class began the switch into editing mode. I shared with them the scene in&nbsp;<i>Donnie Darko</i>&nbsp;where Darko's girlfriend Gretchen gets run over, just by way of example, then we discussed different basic editing concepts like classical cutting, master shot, sequence shot, cutting to continuity, matching on action, and such. Given that one student has much of the main footage on his MacBook, I was concerned about him having to do the lion's share of the editing once the principal photography ended, so we divided up the class into groups--one will help the editor, the others will fashion a trailer for the film, a making-of featurette, a short music video promoting the class, and a blooper reel. We also spent some time listening to various possible songs for the soundtrack off of one of the computers (mostly using YouTube), and it proved very difficult for the class to agree on a song. For the chase scene, for instance, we tried out "On the Run" by Pink Floyd (too psychedelic), the music for the parkour chase scene in Luc Besson's&nbsp;<i>District 13</i>&nbsp;(too techno, a frequent complaint), Def Leppard's "Photograph" (bleh), and the theme song from&nbsp;<i>The Exorcist</i>&nbsp;(too well-known). I confessed to the class that any song by Coldplay makes me break out in hives. We may end up using songs by Radiohead and Muse. The director also decided to wait for a rough cut before matching more songs to certain scenes.<br /><br />3) By the afternoon, we shot a brief classroom scene that kept being interrupted by piano and trumpet playing nearby. Then we watched of the raw footage of the past few days, and while much of it was fine, I was dismayed by the little mistakes that kept sneaking into takes (the corpse blinking, people looking at the camera, shaky pseudo-steadicam shots, awkward compositions, etc.). Given the set-up of the class, the limited amount of time to shoot, and the aleatory conditions around us at any given moment, it is very hard to not get impatient, to not rush the next shot, and we pay every time there's a small mistake magnified in the camera lens. It's frustrating to see all of the imperfections in spite of all of everyone's best efforts to avoid them. Then again, we have time to reshoot, edit, and polish for the next few days.<br /><br />4) Lastly, we worked on a title. I've heard that Woody Allen comes up with his titles last in the process of making his films, but we need one sooner so we can incorporate it into all of the extensive DVD extras and featurettes. Students came up with&nbsp;<i>Their Eyes Were Watching Kyle, Collision, The Lady and the Laughter, End of the Night, A Lesson in Obsession, Ms. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Obsessing</i>&nbsp;<i>and</i>&nbsp;<i>Love the Laughter</i>&nbsp;(a popular favorite to be used for the blooper reel),&nbsp;<i>Fixation, Fetish, The Most Dangerous Photo, Mania, The Sound and the Photo, To Love a Picture, Citizen Kyle, Kyle's Road Trip, There Will Be Roadkill, Avatar 2,</i>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<i>Follow the Laughter</i>. We finally settled on&nbsp;<i>Third Night</i>&nbsp;for now.<br /><br />Tomorrow, the class will begin to piece all of this fragmented footage together.</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/AykJg35La20" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/02/video-production-notes-body-lying-on.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-1281471240187022812017-02-19T17:48:00.000-05:002017-02-20T09:57:57.288-05:00Video production notes: making Entrapment (2012) <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/--mHww5geU44/WKofBCQZYOI/AAAAAAAAI-k/jpRXSIrbAQIwwfClsFw5hUEg-6a__gnuQCLcB/s1600/1photo%2B%252817%2529.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/--mHww5geU44/WKofBCQZYOI/AAAAAAAAI-k/jpRXSIrbAQIwwfClsFw5hUEg-6a__gnuQCLcB/s320/1photo%2B%252817%2529.JPG" width="239" /></a></div>Way back when, a long time ago, one of my video production classes made a movie entitled <i>Entrapment </i>at an antebellum mansion in a small town in South Carolina. <a href="https://twitter.com/morganaorgana">Morgan Honaker</a> directed it.<br /><br /><br />By the by, I believe the star of this film is now the president of the student body at Clemson.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Here's the trailer:<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/K6VmOt-53vE/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/K6VmOt-53vE?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div>I haven't been able to locate the actual movie online yet, but here's the blog <a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2012/01/video-production-class-weblog-day-13.html">post</a> about making the movie:<br /><br /><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 14.4px;">Today, the video production class finished the DVD containing the movie&nbsp;</span><i style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14.4px;">Entrapment</i><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 14.4px;">. &nbsp;The class will show the movie to the entire school tomorrow during the Interim presentations. &nbsp;So far, the buzz has been good. &nbsp;My significant other just now flinched at a jump scare while watching the movie, and the film has a delightfully bleak, surprising, and abrupt ending that leaves the viewer with a pleasant sense of hopelessness and Poe-esque entombment.&nbsp;</span><br /><br style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14.4px;" /><span style="font-family: &quot;georgia&quot; , serif; font-size: 14.4px;">My notes from the past few days:</span><br /><br /><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14.4px;">"There's so much blood!" --Jude<br /><br />1) Now, on the morning of the 9th day of the production, the class is busy editing the "Making of" video, the final movie entitled&nbsp;<i>Entrapment</i>, and the blooper reel, so I can pause for a moment. We've been shooting at the manor all week, but it feels like one long day.<br /><br />2) A cold mansion on a wet dark morning. &nbsp;The crew is in the small dining room filming a scene where Fiona hops out of a cabinet by the back door. I'm sitting in a decidedly chilly gun room that could use a fire in its fireplace. We keep the heat off to cut down on noise in the room tone. &nbsp;I keep recording random comments from the crew in the Moleskine:<br /><br />"You still need to turn around faster," says the director.<br /><br />"He turned around before she said Boo!"<br /><br />"Go back in your hidey hole, Fiona."<br /><br />"Are we getting enough reaction from Jude?"<br /><br />"I am not a chipmunk."<br /><br />"Don't use the mic as a weapon." &nbsp;They shoot another take. &nbsp;Jude grimaces afterwards.<br /><br />"He wouldn't have calmed down that quickly."<br /><br />I point out that the "The goal is to end up with a better movie than the blooper reel."[Later, we realize that we will have to reshoot this scene. &nbsp;Any shot that involves Jude and Fiona talking to each other for any length of time requires at least 15 takes, and the director wishes that she had taken more.]<br /><br />Every time the crew changes places, the cinematographer grabs the camera and says "Moving!" She claims that she has some shots that she hates (but has to use anyway), and others that she loves. The class has a chronic tendency to start filming a scene without remembering to turn on the microphone.<br /><br />3) In the afternoon, the sky darkens considerably as we prepare Fiona for the haunting moment when she realizes that she and Jude are now in the old photograph. It's not easy getting her to look properly freaked out, so she jabs her fingers in her eyes to make herself cry, and says "This is why I haven't cried in front of anyone since the fifth grade." I think of Kubrick tormenting Shelley Duvall for weeks and months in the midst of making&nbsp;<i>The Shining</i>. &nbsp;Is directing inherently sadistic?<br /><br />"Later, we're going to add in a loud bang," says the director. "Look up," she says to Fiona. "Turn your body forward. &nbsp;Yell `Jude' and run out of the room."<br /><br />The director bangs on the wall. "Do you know what to do?"<br /><br />"Look bewildered and on the edge of mental breakdown?"<br /><br />"Right." Meanwhile, I take pleasure in shooting&nbsp;footage from the bird's eye point of view from the landing over the stairs.<br /><br />4) Still later in the day. &nbsp;The crew works very hard to finish scene 2. Bored, I doze briefly in the parlor (oddly decorated with elephants and Santa Claus figurines), but not for long, because sleepers tend to end up on film. At one point, Jude fell asleep for 3 hours, so we placed some reflecting foil on his head.<br /><br />5) I keep opting for a student to lie face down in a small empty fountain (except for some rank cold dirty water) at the side of the house to help create atmosphere in an early point-of-view shot, but no one seems inclined to do it. We all agree that a catering service would be nice. &nbsp;Some hot chocolate?<br /><br /><a href="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/C-_ZnnNGEIRraLGQXaZm9zggFAUesQ6b6-dB5dK6E411JILUDO3BKvNl7_R-_9WPSGhB9TPwGADKnaQ9nPqfnGQElMJd70hD95TWCbGzhAD_MUOvqJk" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; color: #999999; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" height="319px;" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/C-_ZnnNGEIRraLGQXaZm9zggFAUesQ6b6-dB5dK6E411JILUDO3BKvNl7_R-_9WPSGhB9TPwGADKnaQ9nPqfnGQElMJd70hD95TWCbGzhAD_MUOvqJk" style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 4px;" width="427px;" /></a>6) "I'm not a character. &nbsp;I'm a scaractor," says Jude in the midst of a "Making of" interview. &nbsp;A football player, Jude chiefly acts with his eyebrows and his forehead with lots of squinting and rubbing his eyes. He has been working hard, but he distinctly does not enjoy the tender reunion scene that includes this dialogue:<br /><br />Fiona: "Jude, you can't leave me like that again. &nbsp;I don't want my closest friend getting hurt."<br /><br />Jude: "I won't leave you, but we have to get out of this house."<br /><br />I get the impression that he would prefer to not to have to look meaningfully into her eyes. We end up having to shoot this take over and over, more than ten times, with Jude getting more exasperated throughout. I tell him this is the reason why major movie stars earn 12 million dollars a picture. &nbsp;Jude replies, "I would cut off my leg for 12 million, and buy myself a new one." &nbsp;He also says he's going to "Tebow after this." Whenever I say anything critical about&nbsp;<i>Scooby Doo</i>, Fiona says she loves the show. &nbsp;She finds the The Black Knight museum episode was especially scary.<br /><br />7) By yesterday afternoon, the crew shot a nice action scene in which the two stars ran the length of a house (with two crew members following close behind, and the "Making of" director behind them) before a door slams and Fiona screams. &nbsp;The movie contains several moments where ghosts (?) bang on or slam doors (using fishing line). &nbsp;At one point, I slammed the front door so hard, plaster fell from around the windows. The owner (standing right next to me) was saintly nice about it, but if it had been my house, I would've kicked everyone out, especially since we were supposed to be finished the day before.<br /><br />At one point, a door slowly shut by itself right after a take. &nbsp;We figured the Captain, the original owner of the house, wanted to be included in the shot.<br /><br />8) This afternoon, I read Portis'&nbsp;<i>True Grit&nbsp;</i>in the parlor as Fiona repeatedly gasps hysterically, twirls around, drops the photograph, and falls on the floor in the main hallway as the cinematographer lies on the floor with the camera and the two ghosts (with lighting equipment) contemplatively chew on some brownies as they look on. Everyone is eager to finish. Jude even points out in an interview that "The promise of getting done is a good motivator," although I have heard some talk that perhaps he has been intentionally been a difficult in a&nbsp;<i>diva</i>-esque way today. Jude claims that "Acting is very hard, and people don't know how hard it is."<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tAUCYscE36o/TxatCflkFGI/AAAAAAAAEL0/hvWEEnzy4DM/s1600/photo+%252818%2529.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; color: #999999; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-decoration: none;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-tAUCYscE36o/TxatCflkFGI/AAAAAAAAEL0/hvWEEnzy4DM/s320/photo+%252818%2529.JPG" style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 4px;" width="239" /></a>When asked how she gets herself to look scared, Fiona confesses that she thinks of "horrible things, like heights and terrorists." &nbsp;Both actors have much respect for the director, whom they call "Mein Fuhrer."<br /><br />Late on the last afternoon of principal photography, we reshoot the first scene when Fiona and Jude walk into the house for the first time. &nbsp;Then, we keep waiting for the director to say "That's a wrap," but first she and the cinematographer have to shoot another scene of the front of the house, and then get some more outdoor room tone (nature tone?) out back. &nbsp;So, when she finally says the phrase in the bus, the moment ends up being a bit anticlimactic.<br /><br />9) Over the weekend, the students found that mixing the sound, especially music, proved trickier and more time-consuming that editing the video. &nbsp;They worked until 11 every night in the classroom. &nbsp;Today, they just needed for Fiona to scream into the mic and then loop the scream for the last scene. &nbsp;As they edit, we spend part of the time studying the symmetrical composition of each shot in the new&nbsp;<a href="http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/what-kind-of-bird-are-you-deconstructing-the-moonrise-kingdom-trailer?utm_source=dlvr.it&amp;utm_medium=twitter" style="color: #999999; text-decoration: none;">trailer</a>&nbsp;for Wes Anderson's&nbsp;<i>Moonrise Kingdom.</i>&nbsp; By this afternoon, the students were done and making copies. &nbsp;For whatever reason, (lack of competition between groups? a perfectionist director? a detail-oriented cinematographer?) the class went especially well this year. I feel fortunate to have been involved. &nbsp;</div><div style="font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14.4px;"><br /></div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/gIZJOydbozE" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/02/video-production-notes-making.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-75787958371013960962017-02-12T05:37:00.001-05:002017-02-12T05:37:30.137-05:00"Machete don't text": The Film Doctor's Greatest Hits<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6Mt_4fuyoEE/WKA3vNigVfI/AAAAAAAAI8g/YmhS1VqqUMU-_y-hALn16vVleExbgSb-ACLcB/s1600/cloud-atlas-14307.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="224" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-6Mt_4fuyoEE/WKA3vNigVfI/AAAAAAAAI8g/YmhS1VqqUMU-_y-hALn16vVleExbgSb-ACLcB/s320/cloud-atlas-14307.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div>Over the years, these posts proved much more popular than the other ones. I wonder why?<br /><br />---"<a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2009/10/katie-micah-and-scary-demon-pictorial.html">Katie, Micah, and the Scary Demon: A Pictorial Primer for <i>Paranormal Activity</i></a>"<br /><br />---"<a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2009/05/sabretooth-cat-and-angry-badger.html">The Sabretooth Cat and the Angry Badger: A Pictorial Primer for Hugh Jackman's <i>X-Men Origins: Wolverine</i></a>"<br /><br />---"<a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-weak-are-meat-strong-do-eat-8-notes.html">The weak are meat the strong do eat: 8 notes on <i>Cloud Atlas</i></a>"<br /><br />---"<a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2009/06/hangover-and-chicken-mystery.html"><i>The Hangover</i> and the Chicken Mystery</a>"<br /><br />---"<a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2010/05/rise-and-rise-again-until-lambs-become.html">Rise and Rise Again Until Lambs Become Lions": 11 Questions about Ridley Scott's <i>Robin Hood</i></a>"<br /><br />---"<a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2009/04/dead-man-driving-9-notes-on.html">Dead man driving: 9 notes on the imponderable profundities of <i>Fast &amp; Furious</i></a>"<br /><br />---"'<a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2010/09/machete-dont-text-11-reasons-why-robert.html">Machete don't text': 11 reasons why Robert Rodriguez's <i>Machete </i>is the sweetest film thus far this year</a>."<br /><br />---"'<a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2013/06/mother-nature-is-serial-killer.html">Mother nature is a serial killer:' a discussion about <i>World War Z</i></a>"<br /><br />---"<a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2012/12/django-unchained-and-representation-of.html"><i>Django Unchained </i>and the representation of slavery</a>"<br /><br />Thanks for reading!<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/NjWBvuV89gY" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/02/machete-dont-text-film-doctors-greatest.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-19681123201793948742017-02-10T12:53:00.000-05:002017-02-11T06:14:30.055-05:00New strategies for teaching filmmaking: an interview with OK Keyes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-E1Q-RiCMeaU/WJ39a5s6N1I/AAAAAAAAI6w/mfrfLeqe7ZgpH42mkOmHZhk-xm7Kh0DSwCLcB/s1600/1%2Bokkey.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-E1Q-RiCMeaU/WJ39a5s6N1I/AAAAAAAAI6w/mfrfLeqe7ZgpH42mkOmHZhk-xm7Kh0DSwCLcB/s320/1%2Bokkey.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><i><a href="https://twitter.com/okkeyes">OK Keyes</a> has been helping me with my video production class for years. He's a PhD student now at Virginia Commonwealth University, and I hope some day the institution where I work will be smart enough to hire him on full time. His expertise in cinematography especially made all of the difference in the class. He kindly agreed to be interviewed for the film doctor blog:</i><br /><br />FD--How do you try to resolve the tension in a filmmaking or video production class between teaching students techniques and letting them learn strategies by actually working on their movies?<br /><br />OK--My teaching praxis is centered around this idea of teaching failure by example, through the process of taking, breaking, and making some Thing. I make mistakes purposefully throughout lessons, to engage students with the experiences they have with technology that challenge my false assertions. Teaching technology is a great opportunity proccess these moments of discovery, the "aha!" moment, that is a shared experience between artists and scientists (a bond that I think often goes unacknowledged, in both circles).<br /><br />Instead of showing students the "right way" to use the camera, I encourage them to explore different buttons and settings and engage them with questions about their observations. Is the image brighter or darker? Sharper or blurrier? Noisier or crisper? In this way, the class is co-constructing their knowledge of the camera through observation, interrogation, and discussion. As a facilitator, I might suggest the buttons and sites of investigation, but ultimately the students are just as responsible for teaching one another about the knowledge they are creating together in that space.<br /><br />So to go back to your question about the tension between teaching techniques and making movies, I want to acknowledge that I have grappled with this question for a number of years as a media educator. I have found that if I can help facilitate technological confidence through teaching an investigative approach, then even if the camera stops working or something seems strange with the settings, students will feel less like they are "doing something wrong" but that it is "something they can change." I have found the fear of failure to be one of the biggest barriers in filmmaking, especially with (high achieving) high school students. And so, if I can address that fear while teaching techniques and encourage students to take risks in their filmmaking; then they will trust theirselves (and their team!) while making the film and rely on me less for technical knowledge while in the field.<br /><br />FD--What are some classic mistakes of beginning film crews? What is your list of terms like "happy histograms" as reminders to keep them on task?<br /><br />OK--I think the biggest mistake is not having a clear sense of the roles of each group member. Certainly on a student production, there will be overlap, and someone inevitably will have to step in to be an extra or an extra pair of hands for a technical assist. But, I think it's very important to establish what each member is responsible for. Especially, since the mythos surrounding The Director in popular culture very often (although not always) creates an unbalanced power dynamic between that student director and their peers in the creative process. I try to use a keyword association for each role when explaining to students.<br /><br />Writer - the story (characters/dialogue)<br />Cinematographer - the image (light/framing)<br />Boom Operator - the sound (field/foley)<br />Actors - the performance (emotions/movement)<br />Editor - the time (pacing/flow)<br />Director - the communication (translates between members of the cast/crew)<br /><br />I have found a good strategy in helping to de-center the role of student directors is to position them as the point of intersection - they are the translator. They have to be able to communicate how the cinematographer is framing the image so the actors know if it is a closeup or a wide shot. They need to communicate to the boom operator if the actors are going to move so they can stay out of the shot. They have to be clear and concise in their directions. They are not responsible for the style of the shot, nor the quality of the sound, or even the expressions of the actors, but instead they are responsible for directing all the moving bodies - both cast and crew - through the performance. And keeping in mind, the performance is not just what's happening on screen, but very much what is happening behind the screen as well. An effective director is not one who exerts their sole vision over the entire crew, but one that can allow that vision to be influenced and transformed by the other artists in that space.<br /><br />In terms of helpful things that the director can suggest as checks is to check with cinematographer. Thus, the cinematographer asks: Do you have a happy histogram? Is there anything I need to suggest to the actors to be in better light? How can I help? The cinematographer can ask the actors to look into the camera so that they can do a "spot check" meaning they can check the focus of their eyes in the camera to ensure the image is clear. The director can call quiet on the set so that the boom operator can check the levels of the actors' voices. I try to encourage the director to trust his crew. The cinematographer should be the one initiating the offer for a "playback" or a review of the footage. If the director is asking to rewatch every shot, then not only does it increase the amount of time to do a scene but it doesn't facilitate trust between the director/cinematographer/actors that the performance is being captured to the best of their abilities. Positive feedback and open communication are really crucial. If anything they should check in with the boom operator, by asking questions like: How is the background noise? Do I need to turn off the AC? Do you hear anything weird? Then, finally, consistency is really key. I recommend the following protocol to start a scene:<br /><br />Director: Sound!<br />Boom: Speeding!<br />Director: Camera!<br />Cinematographer: Rolling!<br />Director: Slate!<br />Assistant: Stands in front of the camera and states the Scene / Shot / Take (Ex. Scene 1 / Shot A / Take 3) and *claps* in the shot to sync the sound.<br />(wait for person slating to exit shot)<br />Director: Action!<br />(everyone waits a beat)<br />[Scene begins]<br />[Performance]<br />[Scene ends]<br />(everyone waits a beat)<br />Director: Cut!<br /><br />This is a good way to get in the habit of making sure that you have a "head" and a "tail" on every shot, as well as keeping track of every shot you have taken. I try to keep students on a "three take" rule, meaning that if you can't get the shot you're trying to in three takes, then it might be time to re-imagine or re-configure it. It's okay to go off storyboards if something's not working. But also if the group is trying to do something technically complicated, I want to encourage that and this rule can always be broken.&nbsp;<img src="https://mail.google.com/mail/e/1f60e" /><br /><br />FD--Why did you choose the academic route over working as a full-time cinematographer?<br /><br />OK--I have always felt a real draw towards teaching, and when I finally had the opportunity to teach media production at the college level, I felt connected to the craft in a way I hadn't in a very long time. There is nothing I'm more passionate about than teaching media arts to students who might never have had access to that knowledge otherwise. In addition to now teaching teachers about media arts education, I am also teaching animation to incarcerated youth at Richmond Juvenile Detention Center, through a partnership with Art 180, a community-based arts program near Virginia Commonwealth University. I see media arts, especially filmmaking, as a powerful medium for self-expression and want to create as many pathways as I can for voices that often go unheard and stories that go unseen.<br /><br />Plus, who said I gave up being a cinematographer!? I get longer breaks in the winter and the summer, and am still collaborating with several of my friends. We're in post-production on a film called&nbsp;<a href="https://www.facebook.com/72thatisall/">Witch</a>, that I worked on with a group out in Minneapolis called Oxford Comma Film Cooperative, led by the talented Vanessa Magowan Horrocks. Our last feature-length collaboration was a film called <i>Keepsake</i> (2014), which is still making its ways into festivals, which is super exciting! I might be doing less commercial work now, but I find that to be a lot less soul-crushing. It's been liberating to not have to rely so much on freelance work from gig-to-gig to survive, and I feel very fulfilled in the classroom. I get to be more selective about the projects that I work on, and can focus more on telling stories that I think are important and meaningful to me.<br /><br />FD--How's the GIF work these days? (also, could you send me the link to that gif showing the guy's face morphing due to different lenses?) What is the scholarly importance of GIFs?<br /><br />Haha! Well... GIFs aren't exactly bringing in the big bucks, but weirdly enough those are the moving images that I've accepted to more art shows and galleries. I have a collection of some of my favourite GIFs that I've made at this tumblr page:&nbsp;<a href="http://obligatorykaleidoscope.tumblr.com/">obligatorykaleidoscope.tumblr.com</a>&nbsp;(seizure warning). There's a combination of glitched remixes and bullet-time photography, and even some video taken with an open sensor camera that had an Erlenmeyer flask attached as the lens. The short story is that I had a professor in graduate school who told me to "remove the humans" for my work for half a semester; a lot of the GIFs that went on to be shown in shows or used in my media performance work were the result of that process.<br /><br />I find GIFs really helpful in showing specific scenes from films or techniques for the camera. In particular I have a couple that I love to use in teaching focal length.<br /><br />I use this one for talking about the face:&nbsp;<a href="http://www.danvojtech.cz/blog/wp-content/uploads/160721_Focal-Length-Test_DSC8154-Bearbeitet_v2net.gif">http://www.danvojtech.cz/blog/wp-content/uploads/160721_Focal-Length-Test_DSC8154-Bearbeitet_v2net.gif</a><br />I use this one for talking about compression/expansion of background:&nbsp;<a href="https://i.imgur.com/XBIOEvZ.gif?noredirect">https://i.imgur.com/XBIOEvZ.gif?noredirect</a><br /><br />FD--What do you see as the future of cinematography?<br /><br />OK--Oh wow. What a question. I think we are going to see some really, really big changes in the way that people of color are portrayed on film - and I'm talking about in terms of representation but in terms of lighting/film stock/camera sensors. Bradford Young is a cinematographer I've been following for a while since his work on Pariah (2011). With the news that he'll be filming the&nbsp;<a href="http://www.slashfilm.com/han-solo-movie-hires-selmaarrival-cinematographer-bradford-young/">upcoming Han Solo spin-off movie</a>, I'm very very excited to see how his unique style and approach to color/light/saturation will influence the direction of cinematography for the next generation. I also would suggest checking out the work of Isiah Donté Lee, who went to UNC and was the cinematographer on Burning Sands (2017),&nbsp;<a href="http://filmmakermagazine.com/101431-we-were-interested-in-creating-something-raw-dp-isiah-donte-lee-on-burning-sands/">which was accepted in Sundance</a>.<br /><br />In terms of technical, I think the drone becoming cost-effective for a lot of independent filmmakers is going to be a game changer in terms of closing the gap around the way that movement is handled between low-budget and high-budget films. While I certainly have come to appreciate well-composed still frames, I think this has become a type of compensation for independent films, where the director/cinematographer might have opted for a moving shot had the money been there for a Steadicam/tracking/aerial shot. I think the option of movement now means that those decisions can be more purposeful rather than a response to a limitation. In relation to movement, I also cannot stop thinking about the use of GoPro's in <i>As Above, So Below</i> (2014). That was such a big shift for me in how I thought about the found-footage aesthetics and how far they've come in the horror tradition since <i>The Blair Witch Project</i> (1999). I found the cinematography in <i>AASB</i> to be really effective at building an intimacy and vulnerability through the multiple lenses and perspectives in play throughout the film.<br /><br />I guess, in short, I think there are about to be some really big shifts in the independent scene both in terms of the ways in which cameras treat bodies on screen as well as the type of movements those cameras can make.<br /><br />FD--Why should every school have a media technology class as a serious part of its curriculum?<br /><br />OK--Uh... is there a way to approach this question without being too political? I guess, in being careful with my words, I would suggest that American education has never really had a large focus on media literacy, as some European countries do (the UK and Finland come immediately to mind). But the ability to critically engage with media is only made possible once one understands how they are constructed. Think about how we teaching critical analysis of literature... we have to know how to read AND write in order to produce a critical analysis of a literary work. I think we can think of media in similar terms. Most folks understand how to "read" media by watching it. A film course can help unpack some of the meaning, history, and sociocultural context of the work. But it is a production course that teaches one how to "write" media. I go back to the original word for photography - photos (light) graphos (writing/drawing) - writing/drawing with light. In my experience as an educator, I have found that once students understand how media is made - how it is constructed - they can begin to see the ways in which all the media they interact with and consume in their daily lives is also constructed. They engage with it differently because their perspective about it has changed. That is the power of media arts education, in my opinion.<br /><br />FD--How is the internet useful for new filmmakers?<br /><br />OK--Something not working? Google it! Need to put together a crew? Post it on Facebook! Want to get hired for a job? Upload your reel to Vimeo! I think there is a great number of ways that new filmmakers can distribute their work as well as build networks and engage in self-directed learning. I have learned so much from tutorials on YouTube, too many to list here. It is also the space that I first started uploading my work in middle school and getting feedback from an online community I participated in. If it hadn't been for that early experience, I don't know if I would have ever been interested in picking up a camera, but here I am! There are also just so many useful tools for filmmakers from storyboard templates, to suggestions for affordable lighting equipment, to script formatters like the&nbsp;<a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/screenplay-formatter/mkgjacapojenkdkncfnooheepcmcgpik?hl=en">Google Doc Screenplay Plugin</a>&nbsp;(which in full transparency, one of my middle school students introduced to me)! I think it's just a matter of pursuing what you are most interested in and seeing where those Google rabbit holes take you!<br /><br />Once again, I could write a novel about the important role the internet plays in developing self-directed learning skills in young people, but I suppose that's what a dissertation is for!&nbsp;<img src="https://mail.google.com/mail/e/1f606" /><br /><br />FD--Much thanks, OK Keyes, for your insights. I look forward to working again with you next year.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/Bxr-GeyUpX8" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/02/new-strategies-for-teaching-filmmaking.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-35249046119775294872017-01-25T17:39:00.002-05:002017-01-25T17:48:14.723-05:00Cherry Picking: Part 3 of Chronic Toxicity: Debating Gary Taubes' The Case Against Sugar<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-q7l-PYlApE8/WIkmAIcm3jI/AAAAAAAAI3k/dqUeBAUrPjY7eKwquMuVR5t_qhvStn73gCLcB/s1600/The-Case-Against-Sugar-Cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-q7l-PYlApE8/WIkmAIcm3jI/AAAAAAAAI3k/dqUeBAUrPjY7eKwquMuVR5t_qhvStn73gCLcB/s320/The-Case-Against-Sugar-Cover.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>For those unaware, I have been debating with my mother on this blog recently about the evil slow effects of sugar addiction leading to metabolic syndrome, obesity, diabetes, and cancer. Gary Taubes' new book <i>The Case Against Sugar</i>&nbsp;makes a thorough case for cutting out all processed variations of sugar from one's diet right now in much the same vein as stopping smoking cigarettes, but of course <i>some people</i> have to bring up other things like meat and dairy products, other people such as my mother. We first started this debate <a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/01/chronic-toxicity-debating-gary-taubes.html">here</a>&nbsp;and continued it <a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/01/dear-son-part-2-of-chronic-toxicity.html">here</a>. For a nice summary of Taubes' points, you can now turn to <i>The New York Times</i>' recent <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/opinion/if-sugar-is-harmless-prove-it.html?smid=tw-share&amp;_r=0">interview</a> with Taubes, where he points out:<br /><br />"To understand the case against sugar, using a criminal justice metaphor, you have to understand the crimes committed: epidemics of diabetes and obesity worldwide. Wherever and whenever a population transitions from its traditional diet to a Western diet and lifestyle, we see dramatic increases in obesity, and diabetes goes from being a relatively rare disorder to a common one. One in 11 Americans now has diabetes. In some populations, one in three or four adults have diabetes. Stunning numbers.<br /><br />So why sugar? Well, for starters, recent increases in sugar consumption are always at the scene of the crime on a population-wide level when these epidemics occur. And sugar is also at the scene of the crime biologically, and it’s got the mechanism necessary. But the evidence is not definitive; what I’m arguing is still a minority viewpoint."<br /><div><br /></div><div>At any rate, my mother recently wrote back, and here is her email:</div><div><br /></div>Dear Son,<br /><br />It is not fair to bring up crab cakes as they are a great favorite of mine when we are at the beach. Of course you can have an occasional one when you are on vacation. However, moderation in general doesn't work well when it comes to healthy eating. So eat a plant based diet all the rest of the time- see <i>Plant Strong</i>- an excellent book to read.<br /><br />If we are cherry picking research studies, I ask you to look at the research known as the Adventist Health Studies. The Seventh-day Adventists of Loma Linda California practice healthy lifestyles, but differ in how much meat they eat. One of the lead researchers, Dr. Gary Fraser, said "Not eating meat is clearly important because it seems to have an impact on heart disease and cancer" (quoted in <i>The Blue Zones</i>--another book you should read).<br /><br />And since dairy is liquid meat, it also is not good for you. Plus dairy cows lead a miserable life in the large dairy farms. I want you to look at plant-based diets because heart disease is the largest killer of American men and women.<br /><br />Since this is a film blog, please watch <i>Forks over Knives</i>. It could save your life.<br /><div><br /></div><div>Love, mom</div><div>-------------------</div><div><br /></div><div>Dear mother,</div><div><br /></div><div>I appreciate your interest in me eating less meat and dairy products, but I still wonder--as long as I have knocked out most processed foods with sugar from my diet (except for the occasional glass of V-8, which I just drank while enjoying some colby cheese), I find getting rid of dairy products to be even more difficult than ever. My problem is I'm not hugely fond of most vegetables. When I was younger, I tended to have an instinctual dislike of green food. Ideally, we can agree on some level that as long as someone cuts out the sugar <i>and </i>the meat, only shop along the edges of the grocery store (away from processed foods), and mostly stick to vegetables and fruits (but no fruit juice), then one would do fine.&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>I have largely cut out sugar from my diet over the past 2 weeks, and I've lost 5 pounds, and plan to lose more (and I wasn't that heavy to begin with). I feel better, and I don't fully know why (although Taubes has many more examples and studies in <i>The Case Against Sugar</i>, so I wasn't just "cherry picking" one). Deleting sugar from my diet just feels right, and I enjoy reading an entire book that confirms my hunch, even if all of the medical evidence has not arrived yet.</div><div><br /></div><div>Yours ever devotedly (and always tending to get the last word),</div><div><br /></div><div>FD &nbsp;</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/de6KeWf9ZHA" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/01/cherry-picking-part-3-of-chronic.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-14938468930203600002017-01-20T11:13:00.001-05:002017-01-20T14:27:20.973-05:00Dear Son: Part 2 of Chronic Toxicity: Debating Gary Taubes' The Case Against Sugar<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JDWRdrQMOEo/WIIwZ3ukvFI/AAAAAAAAI2U/QGY8Wz8Yp74DYze6nUC7z-4uR1UFRL4aACLcB/s1600/1101500515_400.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JDWRdrQMOEo/WIIwZ3ukvFI/AAAAAAAAI2U/QGY8Wz8Yp74DYze6nUC7z-4uR1UFRL4aACLcB/s320/1101500515_400.jpg" width="242" /></a></div><i>Gary <a href="https://aeon.co/essays/sugar-is-a-toxic-agent-that-creates-conditions-for-disease">Taubes</a>' new book </i>The Case Against Sugar<i> gives me a feeling of intestinal control in an increasingly deranged world. Looking for a way to avoid metabolic syndrome, hypertension, heart disease, obesity, diabetes, dementia, and cancer? Taubes recommends that you cut out all variations of sugar in your diet (by the by, the image here is from a Time cover in 1950 cheerfully depicting the way Coca-Cola was taking over the world at that time). In my last <a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/01/chronic-toxicity-debating-gary-taubes.html">post</a>, I started a debate with my mother, who has very strong opinions about diet, but does not agree with Mr. Taubes. Here is her reply:</i><br /><span style="background-color: white;"><i><br /></i></span>Dear son,<br /><br />I am pleased that you are interested in a healthy diet. Unfortunately I do not consider Gary Taubes to be a good guide. Looking over the last 25 years or so I find that I have found some authors that have been very helpful in my quest for a healthy life. <br /><br />The first was Dr. Dean Ornish whose book in 1990 on reversing heart disease with a vegetarian diet showed that blockages in coronary arteries could be reversed. My husband, a doctor, and I decided to go mostly vegetarian and liked the change. The 2nd author was David Kessler whose book <i>The End Of Overeating</i>&nbsp;(2009) was a fascinating look at America's appetite for foods loaded with sugar, salt, and fat.<br /><br />The most recent authors are part of the plant based diet crew-doctors Garth Davis, Joel Fuhrman, Caldwell B. Esselstyn. The research is found in <i>The China Study</i>. Like Dr Ornish, Dr Esselstyn has excellent angiograms in his book showing the outcomes of a plant based diet on coronary arteries.<br /><br />From a personal perspective I find the most telling argument for a vegetarian/vegan diet is the refusal to kill animals for a piece of meat on my plate. Sugar is overdone in processed food for sure, but it is not the evil that Taubes says.<br /><br />love from your 74 year old mother who is still jogging, and medicine free.<br /><div><br /></div><div><i>My reply to her reply:</i></div><div><i><br /></i></div><div>Thanks, mother, for your good points about the advantages of going vegetarian. I tried that once for a couple months, and felt so depleted, empty, and energy-less that I returned happily to mostly eating seafood when I can, in part due to the influence of the seafoodetarian named Mr. Flood in Joseph Mitchell's collection of essays&nbsp;<i>Up in the Old Hotel</i>&nbsp;(1993 edition).&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>I imagine that I very well may have blockages in my coronary arteries as a result, but you have not yet really replied to Taubes' basic point about how people are incorrect in their assumption that eating fat makes you fat. Taubes likes to point to various tribes who abruptly had their diet changed from some local fat-filled food to a much more Americanized diet, after which they became surprisingly diabetic and obese. For instance, take Taubes' discussion of what happened to the people of Tokelau, an island nation in the South Pacific. &nbsp;As he writes, "through the mid-1960s, . . . the Tokelauans had subsisted on a diet of coconut, fish, pork (fed on coconuts and fish), a starchy melon called breadfruit, and another starchy root vegetable known as pulaka. The diet had among the highest fat concentrations in the world at the time--more than 50 percent of the calories consumed came from fat, and most of that was saturated fat from the coconuts" (233). And yet, with this diet, the Tokelauans ate very little refined sugar. They tended to be thin, and their health was largely good.</div><div><br /></div><div>After the Tokelauans switched over to a more Americanized diet with less fat but far more sugar (and with more physical activity), again in Taubes' words, "diabetes prevalance shot upward. . . . Hypertension, heart disease, and gout also increased significantly . . . Both men and women gained, on average, between twenty and thirty pounds. Children, too, got fatter" (234).</div><div><br /></div><div>Taubes blames the dramatic change in the Tokelauans on their Americanized diet, specifically on the amount of sugar that they were taking in. I could quote from many other passages in Taubes' book, but thus far you haven't really explained why Taubes is not a good guide. Why can't I eat dairy products as much as I like? What's wrong with the occasional crab cake? What do you think?</div><div><br /></div><div>Respectfully, your son,</div><div><br /></div><div>FD</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/CQxZDint2b8" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/01/dear-son-part-2-of-chronic-toxicity.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-50801704458140823872017-01-19T09:32:00.001-05:002017-01-20T02:48:56.594-05:00Chronic Toxicity: Debating Gary Taubes' The Case Against Sugar<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yaqascFe-SM/WIDH8wlxPNI/AAAAAAAAI14/xogktS0If_Yr1Xx1odr6B8InQlptxsgjwCLcB/s1600/The-Case-Against-Sugar-Cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yaqascFe-SM/WIDH8wlxPNI/AAAAAAAAI14/xogktS0If_Yr1Xx1odr6B8InQlptxsgjwCLcB/s320/The-Case-Against-Sugar-Cover.jpg" width="213" /></a><i>I thought I would debate the toxicity of eating or drinking sugar with my mother in an email exchange:</i><br /><br />Dear mother,<br /><br />In the midst of so many arguments about our on-going nearly religious dietary differences, I just now enjoyed Gary Taubes' new book entitled <i>The Case Against Sugar</i>, a highly readable argument that seeks to diagnose the massive health damage caused by our civilization's sugar intake. Taubes provides the reader with an entire history of our culture's sugar addiction, from a period when dessert and chocolate bars did not exist all the way to today's hyper-saturated world of high fructose corn syrup and all of the other mysterious terms that tend to end with -ose that food companies sneak into their products. I've written about this toxicity of sugar <a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2014/09/soda-is-cigarette-of-21st-century-7.html">before</a> in relation to the movie <i>Fed Up</i>, but Taubes goes much further in his claims, relating chronic long-term sugar consumption to not only diabetes and obesity, but also to metabolic syndrome, hypertension, gout, heart disease, dementia, and cancer. Furthermore, Taubes' castigation of the big sugar's evil advertising with its bogus scientists and expert lobbyists reads exactly like Allan Brandt's book <i>The Cigarette Century</i> (2009) in the way that it <a href="http://www.cigarettecentury.com/points.html">shows</a> that an industry will cheerfully propagandize people into poisoning themselves in the name of profits (which also brings to mind <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2016/12/exxon_mobil_is_the_worst_oil_company.html">ExxonMobil</a>'s willingness to help permanently damage the planet's atmosphere again for short-term gain). <br /><br />After a youth of heavy-duty sugar addiction in which I would routinely eat half a box of King Vitamin cereal after school, I did largely quit eating sugar about 3 years ago, and I lost weight and felt better about myself, but more recently, I have allowed various exceptions in that diet (Haagen dasz vanilla bean ice cream, for instance) to interfere with that resolve. Quitting sugar really makes one aware of one's addiction. It sensitizes you to the taste of sugar, and, at one point, I compared a visit to a Krispy Kreme donut shop to an alcoholic falling off the wagon (after eating two donuts, I felt sick to my stomach). Basically, Taubes' book firmed up my wavering resolve to loathe sugar again. So, having quit the stuff recently, I feel better again, but Taubes raises some key questions, such as:<br /><br />1) How little sugar can one eat? He compares the question to how few cigarettes should one smoke, and says that the question is impossible to answer exactly.<br /><br />2) Given that an extreme aversion to sugar obliges one to quit indulging in most processed foods or drinks, couldn't one say that one's diet has already markedly improved for that reason?<br /><br />But what I like most about Taubes' book is the way he argues that while others may focus on a whole range of dietary evils such as carbohydrates, fats, meat, oils, or just plain over-eating as being responsible for the ever increasing amounts of sickly obese people in the world, Taubes keeps his focus solely on sugar. He uses many examples to expose how we tend to view diet in terms of equivalencies. For instances, take the phrase <i>calories in, calories out</i>. If someone eats or drinks too many calories, than that will automatically be reflected in weight gain, but Taubes writes that that kind of thinking greatly oversimplifies the complex hormonal reactions that take place when we eat or drink stuff. We also tend to think that if we eat fat, then that automatically translates to weight gain, but Taubes comes up with several examples of other cultures where the natives would eat ridiculously fatty foods and yet still stay thin, that is, until their diet becomes Americanized. <br /><br />But then, that's when you would say that Taubes has been funded by the meat industry. <br /><br />So, what do you think? How is Taubes wrong? <br /><br />Thanks,<br /><br />FD <br /><br /><i>(Mother said that she will reply with a much more "balanced" case later today.)</i><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/F5bp7Hl-X5Y" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/01/chronic-toxicity-debating-gary-taubes.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-16993712440678922912017-01-11T20:49:00.003-05:002017-01-11T20:49:50.626-05:00The Art of Editing and Suicide Squad<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe width="320" height="266" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/mDclQowcE9I/0.jpg" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mDclQowcE9I?feature=player_embedded" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></div>with thanks to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyNtlmLB73-7gtlBz00XOQQ">Folding Ideas</a><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/7WnIgW-8Y8Q" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-art-of-editing-and-suicide-squad.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-53400265251616077292017-01-01T11:22:00.001-05:002017-01-03T06:06:38.918-05:00The Film Doctor's 7 Most Disliked Films That He Saw in 2016<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Oa0IEhvnCX8/WGknMSZ2qqI/AAAAAAAAI1Y/EFiC4BgovT4LRw7FxRvzQKmN4tVYJqb-QCLcB/s1600/the-lobster02.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Oa0IEhvnCX8/WGknMSZ2qqI/AAAAAAAAI1Y/EFiC4BgovT4LRw7FxRvzQKmN4tVYJqb-QCLcB/s320/the-lobster02.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>[Note: I tried more than ever to not see bad films, so I ended up skipping most of the major releases of the year. Also given that I watched a lot of movies on Blu-ray, I did very much enjoy <i><a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2016/06/be-gone-or-i-will-have-you-whipped.html">Love and Friendship</a>, <a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2016/05/new-jack-kitty-4-notes-on-excellence-of.html">Keanu</a>, <a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2016/01/everyone-deep-in-their-hearts-is.html">The Big Short</a>, Tangerine, <a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2016/01/heteronormative-dread-and-rain-streaked.html">Carol</a>, Formation, Anomalisa, One-Eyed Jacks, </i>and <i>Nocturnal Animals </i>(not to mention two excellent books about film criticism--<a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-o-scott-files.html">A. O. Scott</a>'s <i>Better Living Through Criticism</i>&nbsp;and Owen Gleiberman's <i><a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2016/02/fear-fascination-excitement-and-dread.html">Movie Freak</a></i>), but, as in any year, some cruddier films still appeared before my eyes, much as I sought to avoid them.]<br /><br />7) <b>The Neon Demon</b><br /><b><br /></b>As much as I did enjoy its moody colorful bloody excesses, Nicolas Winding Refn's newest exercise in sharing his obsessions is still a deeply, deeply silly movie. <br /><b><br /></b>6)&nbsp;<b>High-Rise&nbsp;</b><br /><b><br /></b>Ben Wheatley's dystopian study of a large apartment building gone bad left me wondering things: how did he get Jeremy Irons involved? Does the world outside of the high-rise also follow the same post-apocalyptic decline? Has post-apocalyptic destruction become passe? Do the cliches of the post-apocalyptic somehow become cool if it's done with 1970s style? <br /><b><br /></b>5) <b><a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2016/06/no-one-cares-about-reality-anymore-9.html">Knight of Cups</a></b><br /><b><br /></b>I tend to like the idea of <a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-terrence-malick-files.html">Terrence Malick</a>'s uncompromising vision more than I like sitting through his recent films. Once one knows that the movie stars usually had no idea what to do from scene to scene in&nbsp;<i>Knight of Cups</i>, I felt sorry for them and their attempts (as well as Malick's) at futzing around for transcendence, even if it means throwing Natalie Portman in the ocean or watching Brian Dennehy glower and emote as a completely under-written grumpy dad figure. <i>Knight of Cups </i>confirms one's abiding love for a screenplay.<i>&nbsp;</i><br /><b><br /></b>4)&nbsp;<b>The Lobster</b><br /><b><br /></b>Yorgos Lanthimos' pseudo-Kafka-esque parable about the way society favors the marrieds over the singletons left me actively angry at its evil treatment of Rachel Weisz, its unwelcome capacity to make Lea Seydoux dull, and Colin Farrell's dreary portrait of a blinkered pudgy Everyman. I could tell that these many great actors believed in Lanthimos' randomly vicious script, because it means something deep, I am sure.<br /><b><br /></b>3)&nbsp;<b>Macbeth</b><br /><b><br /></b>Justin Kurzel's adaptation of Shakespeare's play also left me with an overwhelming impression of bamboozled movie stars. Lady Macbeth does not benefit any from not being able to rub her hands as she sleepwalks in front of a doctor, as William spells out in his script. In this movie, Marion Cotillard looks wistfully and tearfully off at nothing as she recites lines in a chapel by herself in a way that makes no sense. In this fashion, a radical "reinterpretation" of a play views like pretty people emoting as they recite Shakespeare's greatest hits.<br /><b><br /></b>2) <b>Pride and Prejudice and Zombies</b><br /><b><br /></b>Just, plain, <a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2016/02/in-want-of-more-brains-8-notes-on-pride.html">awful</a>.<br /><b><br /></b><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-14ZuXUpwtiQ/WGknlh-O0qI/AAAAAAAAI1c/kIMvUXIHlzUwUlY6J5mdvJ19QWLrFQ6pgCLcB/s1600/margot-robbie-suicide-squad-promo-photos-posters-and-stills-5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-14ZuXUpwtiQ/WGknlh-O0qI/AAAAAAAAI1c/kIMvUXIHlzUwUlY6J5mdvJ19QWLrFQ6pgCLcB/s320/margot-robbie-suicide-squad-promo-photos-posters-and-stills-5.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>1)<b>&nbsp;</b><b>Suicide Squad</b><br /><b><br /></b>Oh, the great promise of its first trailer, and the crushing resounding thud of its release. Margot Robbie is well cast as Harley Quinn, but what possible interest would her character have in such a painful Joker? What were those motor oil and black eyeball magic monsters and why should we care if the Squad can kill them? &nbsp;Why does Cara Delevingne writhe around amidst all of that bloopy blue CGI lighting in the distance? I was too depressed to write about it.<img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/l9Ddm9xS7DY" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-film-doctors-7-most-disliked-films.htmltag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7704583061723470804.post-59931806220697005182016-12-29T16:55:00.001-05:002016-12-29T20:18:25.159-05:00How does one design a video production class nowadays?--a correspondence with Morgan Honaker<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ldexcKgcGYo/WGV1dHp-krI/AAAAAAAAI1A/EmuWKz6AptkkMPVaH-CSFc--r-hQy9zoQCLcB/s1600/morgan.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="189" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ldexcKgcGYo/WGV1dHp-krI/AAAAAAAAI1A/EmuWKz6AptkkMPVaH-CSFc--r-hQy9zoQCLcB/s320/morgan.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><i>I teach a 2 1/2 week long interim video production class in January, and every year, I wonder what's going on in the filmmaking world that could help with the course. To help answer this question, I ask two of my star alumni filmmakers--Morgan <a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2016/01/compression-wars-dynamic-range-and.html">Honaker</a> and O. K. <a href="http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2012/01/interview-with-student-filmmaker-o-k.html">Keyes</a> for their insights, suggestions, and help with the class. Here's a copy of my recent correspondence with Morgan.</i><br /><i><br /></i><i>First, I learned that she would not be able to assist the class in person, so I wrote:</i><br />I appreciate your help with the video production class in recent years, even if this one doesn't work out. <br /><br />This year, I'm still figuring out how to set up the proper exposure on the Canon T6 DSLR and whether or not I can find some last second lighting on Amazon that doesn't cost too much. Given all of the recent changes in technology, etc., video production class always leaves me wondering if I know what I'm doing. <br /><br />At any rate, I hope your year has gone well.<br /><div><br /></div><div>Morgan responded:<br /><br />Hi Dr., <br /><br />Sorry for the late reply - the holidays kept me a bit busy. I haven't worked with the Canon Ti6, but here are some articles I found about using it in different exposures . . .<br /><br />For low light: <a href="http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2432257&amp;seqNum=9">http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2432257&amp;seqNum=9</a> <br />When to use manual mode: <a href="http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2432256&amp;seqNum=7">http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=2432256&amp;seqNum=7</a><br />General guide: <a href="http://www.the-digital-picture.com/News/News-Post.aspx?News=15624">http://www.the-digital-picture.com/News/News-Post.aspx?News=15624</a><br /><br />Also, in terms of lighting, I would highly recommend investing in a couple of light meters. They can teach students the importance of correct aperture and focal distance better than anything else, and you'll see a vast improvement in their lighting. You can find decent ones for a good price on Amazon (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Leaton-Digital-Luxmeter-Illuminance-Display/dp/B018QLIVSC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1482971419&amp;sr=8-1-spons&amp;keywords=light+meter&amp;psc=1">https://www.amazon.com/Leaton-Digital-Luxmeter-Illuminance-Display/dp/B018QLIVSC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1482971419&amp;sr=8-1-spons&amp;keywords=light+meter&amp;psc=1</a>). There are also smartphone attachments that function as fairly reliable meters, which you can also buy on Amazon (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Luxi-All-Smartphone-Light-Attachment/dp/B00PKTWQTY/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1482971515&amp;sr=8-13&amp;keywords=light+meter">https://www.amazon.com/Luxi-All-Smartphone-Light-Attachment/dp/B00PKTWQTY/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1482971515&amp;sr=8-13&amp;keywords=light+meter</a>). <br /><br />For lights, I would go with some white-lights that you can use gels to manipulate the color with. Fresnels are great lights to have (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/LimoStudio-Photography-Television-Continuous-Spotlight/dp/B00D9UVQWO/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1482971537&amp;sr=8-6&amp;keywords=film+lighting+kit">https://www.amazon.com/LimoStudio-Photography-Television-Continuous-Spotlight/dp/B00D9UVQWO/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1482971537&amp;sr=8-6&amp;keywords=film+lighting+kit</a>), but they do get very, very hot, so it would be a good idea to invest in some gaffer gloves (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Working-Mechanic-Gardening-Scratches-Injuries/dp/B01FIQP7V2/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1482971764&amp;sr=8-4&amp;keywords=heavy+duty+work+gloves">https://www.amazon.com/Working-Mechanic-Gardening-Scratches-Injuries/dp/B01FIQP7V2/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1482971764&amp;sr=8-4&amp;keywords=heavy+duty+work+gloves</a>). You could also try out some LED lights (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LF1BG9M?psc=1">https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00LF1BG9M?psc=1</a>), but you will definitely need to get some gels to manipulate the color (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Lee-102-Light-Amber-Filter/dp/B00BHIJAI2/ref=sr_1_5?s=photo&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1482971886&amp;sr=1-5&amp;keywords=light+gel+rolls">https://www.amazon.com/Lee-102-Light-Amber-Filter/dp/B00BHIJAI2/ref=sr_1_5?s=photo&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1482971886&amp;sr=1-5&amp;keywords=light+gel+rolls</a>). It's hard to find gels that are long enough, so you may want to check out B&amp;H video/audio warehouse. If you're trying to get better lights, you may also want to invest in some c-stands, nets, and flags, also. <br /><br />Hope this is helpful (and not too confusing)! <br /><br />Best,&nbsp;</div><div>-----------------</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-c3A7R95aovw/WGV1i1j6SqI/AAAAAAAAI1E/jKPy7JGqQhsI7EguGszUCFddXYEE47OJgCLcB/s1600/joss.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="318" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-c3A7R95aovw/WGV1i1j6SqI/AAAAAAAAI1E/jKPy7JGqQhsI7EguGszUCFddXYEE47OJgCLcB/s320/joss.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div>Thanks, Morgan. That's very helpful. I'll look further into Fresnels and LED lights. <br /><br />Last year, the students in the different groups ended up stressed about completing their longer movies on time, so I plan on scaling back their length this year. I'm still not sure how much one should devote to teaching them technique in comparison to how much time to let them learn by filmmaking. We may have erred on leaning towards the former, so we created too much pressure on them to use fancier approaches after so many presentations on different subjects. Turning to the actual making of the movie proved tricky. At one point, a director balked at first because he didn't get to shoot his movie idea. Another group over-relied on "fixing it in post." At what point does the equipment become too complicated to be effective? One fellow, who proved a good cinematographer, will return and help me out in teaching the new class how to use the camera. <br /><br />This year, my old assistant chose to go on a trip to Costa Rica, so a new French teacher will help out. We will see how that goes.<br /><br />Cheers, and thanks again,<br /><div><br /></div><div>----------------</div><br />Dr.,<br /><br />I also found a couple of other good lights. If you're going to use the LEDs, I would definitely recommend getting some tungsten lights and some lights with gels as well. Here are links to a couple of decent ones . . . <br /><br />Tungsten lights: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Tungsten-Barndoor-Stuido-Continuous-Lighting/dp/B009R9BNV0/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_4?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1483030314&amp;sr=8-4-fkmr1&amp;keywords=tungsten+lights+cinematography">https://www.amazon.com/Tungsten-Barndoor-Stuido-Continuous-Lighting/dp/B009R9BNV0/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_4?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1483030314&amp;sr=8-4-fkmr1&amp;keywords=tungsten+lights+cinematography</a><br /><br />Filtered Lights: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/RPS-Studio-Filters-Batteries-Cleaning/dp/B00LLGEWS8/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1483030314&amp;sr=8-2&amp;keywords=tungsten+lights+cinematography">https://www.amazon.com/RPS-Studio-Filters-Batteries-Cleaning/dp/B00LLGEWS8/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1483030314&amp;sr=8-2&amp;keywords=tungsten+lights+cinematography</a><br /><br />It's definitely a hard balance to find, especially with the limited time you guys have in the class. I think about 1.5 - 2 days of crash course basics in narrative, cinematography, lighting, sound, and editing (both sound and picture but with an emphasis on the latter) would be sufficient. However, I personally think that narrative is the most important part of filmmaking, so I would spend the most time on effective plot structure (3-act structure, character development, an ending that is both slightly surprising but also feels inevitable, etc.). It's very easy to make something look pretty, but it's much more difficult to convey a story effectively. <br /><br />It wouldn't be a bad idea to consider making the final project no-dialogue. It's a great way to make your students hone in on their story visually and it forces them to think more creatively about what sorts of stories they can tell. And, in general, films should be shown and not told, especially considering that you guys won't have access to really good microphones and post-production sound mixers. Just something to think on. <br /><br />If you are going to include dialogue, though, I think 5-7 minutes is a good length for a week and a half of planning, shooting, and post. And definitely don't let any of them say that they'll "fix it in post." Unless you're on some million-dollar Hollywood film where the crew can afford to do that, the film is going to be awful if too much is done in post-production. Trust me, I have seen it countless times.<br /><br />Well, perhaps your assistant wanted to throw you into a fit of stress and angst that would trickle down to your students and make their filmmaking better. You'd be amazed what a good amount of stress can do to improve the quality of a film. <br /><br />If you have anymore questions, feel free to let me know! <br /><br />Best,&nbsp;</div><div><br /></div><div>---------------------</div><div><br /></div><div><i>At this point, I asked her if she would mind sharing this correspondence on the film doctor blog. I also asked her to finish with what she's been working on lately:</i><br /><br />I wouldn't mind at all. <br /><br />Recently, I've been trying my hand at composing for film and video games. I took a class this past semester where we recreated the score and sound design from parts of <i>Alien, Requiem for a Dream, The Grand Budapest Hotel</i>, a few advertising logos, and for my final project, I chose to recreate a scene from the show <i>Avatar: The Last Airbender</i>. I have only done a little scoring before now, the majority of which was for an arena shooter video game. However, I am going to be doing sound design and score for a independent short film in the next few weeks, and I'm hoping to have a composing reel uploaded to Vimeo before the end of January. <br /><br />As for film more specifically, I've been working on my skills as a mixer. I'm going to be mixing a feature-length independent horror film in the coming year that we're hoping to submit to Fantastic Fest. I've also started mixing for documentaries and am currently working on one about PTSD and the lives of current veterans in America. In addition, I'll be working as a freelance production sound recordist and post-production mixer for a Texas advertising company that is hoping to open a branch in Austin in the coming year. <br /><br />I'm also going to be working on a media studies thesis in the spring semester. It will be styled as a video essay (as seen on the YouTube channel "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/everyframeapainting">Every Frame a Painting</a>" and "<a href="https://vimeo.com/channels/directorsseries">The Directors Series</a>" on Vimeo) in which I will be examining the ramifications of modern Hollywood from 2012 - present. In short, I'm arguing that the current trend of recycled stories - these include remakes of classic movies and video games (<i>Ben Hur, Poltergeist, Mulan, The Lion King, Assassin's Creed</i>, etc.), continuations of old series (<i>Star Wars, BladeRunner, Jurassic Park/World</i>, etc.), and the endless continuation of new series (pretty much any Marvel/DC movie) - will lead to a decrease in audiences' interest in theater-movies and could mark the beginning of the inevitable decline in the theater system as a whole. In addition, by using only those stories that have been proven to make money, Hollywood is leaving little to no room for audiences to discover and explore new ideas through movies. Furthermore, independent films that are telling new stories are finding it difficult, if not impossible, to get their films into theaters (<i>Swiss Army Man, Captain Fantastic, Moonlight</i>, etc.), giving those filmmakers little reason to continue practicing their art. I'll release this thesis on Vimeo by May 2017 (if all goes well). <br /><br />I'll still be working quite a bit as a freelance sound designer and mixer, but I am trying to broaden my skill set to composing and back to media studies critique in the coming year. <br /><br />Hope this is what you were looking for! <br /><br />Best,<br />Morgan</div><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TheFilmDoctor/~4/pv00InVHyys" height="1" width="1" alt=""/>The Film Doctor http://www.blogger.com/profile/03073505923746994988noreply@blogger.com0http://filmdr.blogspot.com/2016/12/how-does-one-design-video-production.html